The Bell Curve:

I went to a sorry baseball game Tuesday night. It was supposed to be the rebirth of World Series hopes for the Anaheim (I still like that name) Angels. They lost two playoff games in New York and were about to lose a third one here at home on Monday, when they staged a quite remarkable extra-inning comeback to win Game 3 of the American League Championship Series.

I had a ticket to Game 4 on Tuesday, and was concerned I’d be sitting in on a funeral instead of a celebration. The comeback allowed me new World Series fantasies, but instead the Angels got hammered 10-1 in a shabby performance that sent me home in the eighth inning. I’m writing this Tuesday night. By the time this article comes out, the Yankees will have taken a 3-1 lead in games in the best of seven series.

If these numbers are unclear to you, or just boring, it’s at least partly because I just got home from the game and I’m still immersed in crowd noise and traffic — and also feeling a small measure of guilt for leaving a playoff game that was still in progress. We have codes about such things, you know.

It led me to wondering, as I sat in traffic, if the time I spend on big time spectator sports is within reason, or if it just keeps me off the street while it makes mush of whatever brain cells are left beneath the gray hair I’ve been allowed to keep.

That question leads me to a review of my day thus far. My daughter Patt picked me up at 3:30 Tuesday afternoon. It took us an hour and a half to get to Angels Stadium. Cars were lined up for what seemed like a mile at each of the turn-offs to the stadium that we could see. Up and down the line drivers played a game of chicken that left those who stuck by the rules apoplectic but without option other than hitting the usurper or allowing him in. (Angel owner Arte Moreno gets some praise here for not jacking up parking rates for the playoff games.)

Once inside the stadium, we were confronted with long lines to get on the escalators, buy expensive food and get into a restroom. The noise was continuous and deafening and my feet were ankle deep in peanut shells, topped with spilled beer. And there was always the chance that my team was going to lose. And sometimes get beat up. Like 10-1.

In this environment, and especially in the lulls while a multitude of new pitchers were being brought into the game by the Angels, I found myself actually considering the question above, and in the process pondering a vision I’ve held for many years about how and where I would like to spend the later years of my life when options are possible. The visions were mostly in stark contrast to the genial chaos we were then inhabiting. So on this night, they become my post-game interview.

When I was much younger, I used to drive across this country at least twice a year, sometimes alone and always marveling at the variety of both people and landscapes. I slept in mom ‘n’ pop motels and ate in small town restaurants well off the freeways. The stability and fiber of these towns spoke to something deeply embedded in my soul.

My most rewarding side trips were to visit college towns. The Midwest is full of them. My son graduated from Carleton in Minnesota; my daughters were accepted at Grinnell in Iowa and Ball State in Indiana. And my college town of Columbia, Mo., was enriched by two smaller schools as garnish to the state university.

I manufactured a life on these trips, putting myself in the spacious yards and porch swings and tiny public libraries and ancient court houses and gracious college grounds, sometimes stopping for an hour or two just to soak it up.

The vision that most often occurred during long stretches of rural highway was retirement in one of these college towns.

I pictured myself in a sturdy brick house free of debt, using the college library to research the writing waiting in my desk drawer, kicking leaves in the fall and smelling spring while there were still patches of snow covering the lawns.

To bolster this picture, wherever I stopped I would buy the local newspaper and study the real estate listings. Inevitably I would find a replica of the sturdy brick house at a price I could meet — and then some — with the equity from my Newport Beach home.

And I would read articles about people who have made such a move into semi-retirement and are watching the world gratefully and enthusiastically from a new perspective.

Traffic jams and spilled beer encourage this sort of thinking, especially when your team loses 10-1. And so I sit at my computer conducting a post-game interview with myself contrasting the real life and the vision. And the vision fades and finally disappears. I’m willing — sometimes even eager — to pay the price of a complexity of discomforts for the nearness of a city for which professional baseball is only a symbol.

I’m comfortably uncomfortable in that place.

So today provides new hope for the Angels. And if they lose there will be new hope next spring for those of us who stick it out, whether from choice or necessity.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.