Something encouraging, something that lives forever.

I was thinking about that at Franklin Covey Field during the Stingers' loss to the Las Vegas 51s on Wednesday night.

Of all the prominent American sports, baseball is the one most closely associated with intergenerational transmission, the passing of a passion for a game from father to son. Sometimes, the passing can be traced back three or four generations. It connects men and boys with the same flesh and blood, but of varying times and circumstances, who otherwise might think they have little in common.

Books have been written, motion pictures made on the subject.

A few years ago, down in one of Franklin Covey's dugouts, then-minor leaguer and future major leaguer Doug Mientkiewicz detailed the rock and roll of severe undulations along his path to an ultimately terrific relationship with his father, Len, framed by the game:

"We were the worst of enemies, and the best of friends. Dad pushed me hard. He used to say, 'If you're not giving 110 percent, you're just fooling yourself.' He never said the game was supposed to be fun. He made me want to quit, and he did everything he could to help me. He could be a teddy bear, but also the toughest SOB on the planet."

Intergenerational transmission isn't always smooth.

But it's usually worth it.

A few years before that, while shadowing the late former Stingers owner Joe Buzas as he plowed through the crowds on the concourse of this same ballpark, greeting ushers and fans and security guards and vendors, on a particularly busy night, he instructed me to look around, to take in the whir of the pregame hubbub.

"Can you hear that?" he asked. "I like to hear the buzz of the fans, the talk, the sounds before a game. Look at that old guy over there, the one walking around with a cap on . . ."

Buzas, who was 75 at the time, stopped and stared at a stooped, elderly man looking for his seat.

"An old guy with a cap. That makes me feel good."

There were old guys with caps on at the park Wednesday night, too. Guys well beyond the onset of the winters of their lives who, no doubt, had both relished their glory years and handed off their zeal for the game to their own.

While noticing them, I

wondered what their eyes had seen, where their paths had taken them, what battles they may have fought and survived years ago, when their bodies were straight and strong, in World War II or Korea or wherever, what baseball games they might have witnessed. I wondered whose Little League teams they may have coached, and all the effort they might have put into earning an honest day's pay and rearing honorable families and teaching life's lessons to youngsters who may or may not have been listening.

They probably had some grand moments and made their mistakes along the way. Saved the world and barked at it, en route.

Maybe all of those old guys reminded me of my late father, who's been gone now for four years. I miss him.

Ten years ago, this week, my dad and I attended a professional baseball game together for the first time in three decades - since we saw the Phillies and Reds play at Philadelphia's old Connie Mack Stadium in 1965 - right here at Franklin Covey, and it was cool.

Beyond cool.

As a kid, my father worked on the grounds crew at Community Park, the field that stood where Derks Field later stood and where Franklin Covey stands now. He hadn't seen a game on the corner of West Temple and 13th South for more than half a century.

From inning to inning, he described in such vivid detail what the place looked like in the late 1930s, where the clubhouse was, what the stands were like, who some of the notable players were who rolled through that yard, the images jumped onto the big screen in my brain. He recounted, in specifics I had never heard before, what life was like back in his day.

I learned a lot that night - about my dad and about his generation.

About old guys.

Conversation comes easy at a baseball game. And never did I appreciate my father, and everything, not just his love for baseball, that he had given me during his life more than on that occasion.

A decade's blown by now, and it seems like it was just an hour ago.

As I remember it, he had a baseball cap on.

In my mind's eye, he still does.