I blame the Topps baseball card company for my emotional meltdown of late 1987. I'd begun collecting baseball cards the year before, despite my near total ignorance of the sport. To me, the larger issue was card value. It was an investment, I insisted to my incredulous father. If Don Mattingly's 1984 rookie card was worth $200, there was no telling how valuable my cards would one day be. My father just laughed. He had the last laugh this summer when I dragged several crates of worthless cardboard from his storage shed to burn in his fire pit.

I learned about baseball through osmosis. The more valuable the card, the better the player, so I soon learned who the players were. I also decoded the cryptic abbreviations on the back of the card. Most importantly, I began watching the games. Until then, pro sports had been an absence in my life. Also, I was unpopular at school, and I suspected the two were related. Among the boys I knew, sports were a main topic of conversation, a key thoroughfare of social intercourse that wasn't available to me. Now I felt as if I could speak the language.

What I didn't understand is that sports are something you have to be raised with, or else it doesn't stick. My father never watched sports, and I had no brothers or cousins from whom to inherit a team allegiance. So I never developed the part of the male psyche that roots long-term identity in a team. I also didn't get why all my classmates wore only Yankees and Mets gear. That just struck me as unoriginal.

I was infatuated with the Mets during their 1986 championship run (it didn't hurt that they had a snazzy music video) but by the time 1987 came around, I'd decided the Mets were over. It was time for a new team. So as opening day approached I brought all my baseball knowledge to bear on the question through a scientific analysis that took into consideration all the key factors: Batting averages, pitching depth, logo coolness. My adolescent brain crunched the data and spit out an answer, and the more I considered it, the more convinced I became: This season belonged to the St. Louis Cardinals.

I can't offer an informed analysis of the 1987 St. Louis Cardinals, mainly because I still know nothing about baseball. But here's what I remember: A pitching roster stacked with talent like Bob Forsch and John Tudor. The impossibly speedy base stealer Vince Coleman. And the deft fielding of Willie McGee and Ozzie Smith, who wowed crowds by jumping a backflip -- a backflip! -- on his way out to shortstop. Surely that must have helped win games. Perhaps Ozzie Smith intimidated opponents with gymnastics.

The Cardinals' weakness was power hitting. Smith, McGee and Coleman could get on base, but as for big bats, St. Louis had only first baseman Jack Clark. That was a concern, but a paucity of the towering home runs that drove my classmates ga-ga may even have appealed to the contrarian streak that led me to eschew the New York teams in the first place. The Cards were small ball, an under-the-radar choice that might just prove me as a baseball genius to the entire school. Then they'd have to hang out with me.

At the mall I loaded up on St. Louis team gear, including a t-shirt which I wore to school, proudly parading in Cardinals red through a sea of blue, Yankees navy and Mets royal. My classmates met my plucky rebellion with ferocious indifference. I didn't care. My statement had been made.

That statement seemed to take on weight when the Cardinals began winning games, enough to lead the league. With every St. Louis victory, the more certain I became that the baseball gods had pointed to the Cardinals' dugout, probably to reward my anguish at school. When I went to summer camp, my mother enabled my complex by mailing the box scores with her letters, which I often digested before the letters themselves. By then every St. Louis victory had begun to feel dangerously like a personal validation. I kept my eye on the scoreboard, and week after week it confirmed: This was the Cardinals' year. This was my year.

The second half of the Cardinals' regular season was not as auspicious as the first. They won barely more games than they lost and in September Jack Clark destroyed his ankle, and with it the Cards' chances of hitting any more home runs. But I kept the faith, and when St. Louis held on to finish the regular season with the best record in the National League, three games ahead of the Mets, I was satisfied.

But the real test would begin with the San Francisco Giants, the last thing standing between St. Louis and a trip to the World Series. San Francisco's lineup was filthy with power sluggers like Will Clark, Chili Davis and Jeffrey Leonard, whom I loathed for showboating as he rounded the bases after home runs, which he would do four times in their series against the Cards. The Giants, it seemed, could shell St. Louis at will, and things looked bleak when the Cards fell behind three games to two. But their pitching came alive in the last two games, keeping the Giants scoreless to catapult St. Louis into the World Series and to the brink of my vindication.

I watched the 1987 World Series in my bedroom on a black-and-white TV. The only people in the tri-state area who had more emotionally invested in the outcome had bet their kids' education on it. The Cards' adversary in this showdown was the Minnesota Twins, another power-hitting team. But if the Cards could shut down the formidable San Francisco lineup, maybe they could overcome Minnesota's Kirby Puckett and Kent Hrbek, too.

St. Louis got off to a terrible start, as the Twins punished them for a combined 18 runs to 5 in the first two games. But the Cardinals rebounded, prevailing in the next three and sending me into a froth-mouthed frenzy. I clutched my toes into the blue shag carpet with each pitch. Every St. Louis hit, I noted by bouncing around my room while blasting the opening salvo from "You Gotta Fight For Your Right To Party," eventually bringing my father to the door with an invitation to turn that fucking trash off. Unwittingly, he'd proved the song's message. I forged on, quieter but no less rabid. The Cardinals were within one victory of the World Series title.

Oct. 25, 1987 was the day my world fell apart. The Cards had muffed Game 6 and now were back at the Metrodome to decide my fate. I didn't dare take my eyes off the television. I smelled blood in the second inning when St. Louis lit up Twins pitcher and personal nemesis Frank Viola for two runs. By the top of the fifth with the Cards still ahead by a run, I was ready to graciously accept the respect and admiration of my entire school, and preparing my I-told-you-so's.

But a Minnesota run in the fifth and another in the sixth put an end to all that. By the time they scored again in the bottom of the eighth, time looked to be running out very quickly for St. Louis. In the ninth inning, the phone rang. It was my friend Scott, calling with condolences. I was as hysterical as if Kirby Puckett had come to my house and murdered my dog.

"Jeez," Scott said when I started to hyperventilate. "It's just a game."

I slammed the phone down. It was not just a game.

Then it was over, and there was cheering and confetti and the wrong team celebrating in the infield. A year's worth of adolescent dreams slopped out of me like so much champagne on the Twins locker room floor. I'm afraid I yelled at my mother when she came to comfort me. I'd felt she was being patronizing, but worse than that, she didn't understand. I repeat: It wasn't just a game.

In the off season Jack Clark defected to the Yankees, which I considered an unforgivable betrayal, but really it was baseball I couldn't forgive. I continued watching the games but the spark had gone out. Having been crushed, I could no longer give myself so freely to a team. I sensed that even the schoolyard rewards I imagined were at stake couldn't be worth pain like that. I shut off the TV and let my baseball fandom quietly die.

The postscript to the story is I'm happily engaged to a Minnesota woman, a lifelong Twins fan who remembers the 1987 World Series quite differently. Nevertheless, we've managed to get past our differences, and even enjoyed a number of games together at the Twins' beautiful Target Field. So I must have forgiven baseball after all. Still, I think I'll keep my distance from it.