Every now and then baseball does something bigger than itself. You might call it magic. You might call it inspiring. I guess you could even call it divine.

The sport is so full of memorable moments. Some of them we talk about for decades.

Most of my memories belong to the Braves. Listening to Milo Hamilton call the games on my transistor radio. Watching Phil Niekro’s knuckler dance. Chubby Bob Horner and lanky Dale Murphy taking us to the show. Sid Bream’s lumbering slide into home plate. The trio of Glavin, Maddux, and Smoltz.

But that’s just baseball. That’s the beauty of the game. This is the stuff of the dreams of every kid who has ever put on a glove and slapped his fist into the leather.

What I’m talking about goes beyond the game itself.

When Jackie Robinson walked onto the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 and took his place a few feet away from the bag at first base, baseball changed. Our perception of the world began to change.

When 9/11 hit our nation, baseball paused. Ten days later it gave us something to cheer about again. The Braves hugged the Mets in the first game played in New York City after the attack. Boston fans started singing “New York, New York” instead of “Sweet Caroline.” I can still see President Bush standing on the mound for the first pitch of game three in the World Series that year.

Baseball gave us our pride back in spades. Grown men playing like kids for a few hours spoke to the soul of what it means to feel alive.

I watched most of the World Series this year. The Dodgers were impressive. The Yankee fans breathed life back into the Bronx Bombers in game four.

The Superbowl is played in one game. The ups and downs come and go quickly.

Baseball rips at your gut over a series of games. Everybody plays with emotion. Managers pull out all the stops. The rules of managing a game during the regular season are tossed out the window. Fans yell harder. The tension carries over for days. I lose sleep watching these games.

But then something happened.

In the middle of the fifth inning, I got up off the couch and went to the kitchen for a piece of pie. The Yankees were pounding the Dodger pitching like some 12-year-old was lobbing fat, easy softballs to the plate. Game four was a Yankee blow out. Game five wasn’t looking good for the boys from Los Angeles.

I could hear the TV from the kitchen. The announcers went silent. I thought maybe it was a signal loss. No crowd noise. No cheering. No commercial clatter.

I stepped around the corner to see what was going on. The camera panned across the stadium. All 46,000 fans were standing silently. It was hard to tell, but it seemed like every last one of them was holding a placard by both hands in front of their chests.

Then the camera on the field passed in front of the dugouts. Players on both teams along with coaches, bat boys, trainers, water boys, Umpires, and grounds crew all stood in single file. All of them holding the same placard. Cameramen, sports news guys, TV personalities, the crew in the back trailer, sound guys, and concession workers.

Everybody was holding up a card with a name on it. Some cards had three or four names.

I guess I’ve been living under a rock. I had no idea what was going on. Nothing was being said. There was almost a sense of reverence in the air.

Then the announcer said something like, “Major League Baseball joins with everyone who Stands Up for Cancer.”

I did a little research. Apparently, this recognition has been going on for a number of years. It wasn’t founded by baseball, but baseball has become an iconic promoter of cancer awareness.

The placards finally made sense. Freddie Freeman’s simply said “Mom.” Others had names like Uncle Frank, My Dad, Julie, Robert, or My little girl, Angie.

For a moment baseball stood still and recognized that there are things in life more important than the game. Every card connected us as a human race. All the crazy cheers and rowdy rantings gave way to a silence that took us to a memory of someone we loved. Some have survived. Some have lost the battle.

I thought about my good friend, Wayne. He said to me once upon a time, “If there’s a way for me to fight this beast, I’d be crazy not to try.” He fought well. He got seven extra years out of his life that brought him a lot of joy. He found a sense of awe in the smallest moments. Cancer taught him to look at life differently.

I have seldom seen the kind of clarity with which he lived his final years. He became my companion in my time of loss. In spite of his own journey, he joined me on mine. We sat for hours over many sunsets and talked about living more than dying. He helped me find myself in the midst of grief.

I thought about Marion and how she lived with Mike’s cancer his final two years. How her family was and is changed forever because of it. It is not lost on me that I have entered into her life and her house where there will always be a memory of Mike, his way of doing things, his place at the table, and his way with the kids.

If I had a card, these are the two names I would write on the front of it. One I knew like a brother. The other I never got the chance to know at all.

What I felt in that moment when the game paused in the middle of the fifth inning was not sadness, though. If I was moved to tears, it was not because of great loss or overwhelming self-pity. What I felt was an indescribable sense of togetherness.

I thought about the fact that these players, whom we often revere and hate, have real lives with real everyday experiences common to us all. They know what it means to sit for long hours in a hospital. They know what it’s like to hold the hand of someone you love for the last time. Not everything in their lives is about the game.

18.6 million of us watched the World Series that night. Every last one of us has something in common. We love the game, and we have people whom we love. Sometimes cancer brings us to our knees. And, when it does, we all learn to live again.

Death, in any form, does not win.

When the silence was over, the stadium erupted into cheers. Sober faces turned into smiles. And the Dodgers tied it up in the bottom half.

I love this life. As complex and trying as the journey has been, I believe in a Greater plan. I may be in the eighth inning, but I’ve still got a few swings left.

And I’m not talking about baseball.