A little over a week ago, I stepped out the front door to meet a girlfriend for brunch. It was an unusually warm early Spring afternoon in Chicago, 60 degrees and sunny – the perfect day for baseball.

I had chosen to take the #22 Clark bus south to meet my friend at our chosen destination, a Scottish pub in the City’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. The Clark bus is one of those lines that seems to extend forever and goes through so many of Chicago’s key neighborhoods. Start riding at the northernmost extreme, and by the time you reach downtown, you’ll have passed through the trendy LGBT neighborhood of Andersonville, taken a gander at historic Wrigley Field, whizzed past the Chicago History Museum and landed in the thick of it all in Chicago’s Loop.

I boarded the bus at 11:45 AM, just in time to catch the beginnings of a crowd headed over to the Friendly Confines for Game 3 of the Cubs’ home opening series against the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Cubbies are an institution in the Windy City, one of the National League’s original teams founded in 1876.

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Maybe it all began with Don Henley and the Eagles singing about the Hotel California.

On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair,
Warm smell of colitas rising up through the air.
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light.
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim,
I had to stop for the night.
There she stood in the doorway,
I heard the mission bell.
And I was thinking to myself -
This could be heaven or this could be hell.
Then she lit up a candle, and she showed me the way.
There were voices down the corridor -
I thought I heard them say…

Welcome to the Hotel California

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