Pretty soon Yankee Stadium will host it's final regular season baseball game, on September 21, 2008, as it makes way for a new ballpark just across the street from it. For someone who's been a Yankee fan for more than 30 years this comes as a bittersweet moment.
"Bittersweet moment" is a phrase that gets bandied about as often as "the sky is blue", but in this case it really is a sad and happy moment, all in one. This is as sacred a place as there is in all of sports. It has stood for 84 years and no sporting venue has witnessed more great moments than this one; from boxing matches (with the likes of Benny Leonard, Jack Dempsey, and the late great Joe Louis) to college football games (Notre Dame-Navy played there from the mid-1920's to the mid 1940's) and professional football games (Yankee Stadium is home to the "Greatest Game Ever Played", as the NFL held it's championship game there in 1958 between The Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants) to Papal visits, to great speeches ( Knute Rockne's "win one for the Gipper" speech and Lou Gehrig's somber "Luckiest Man on Earth" speech) no other sporting place in history has been a bigger part of Americana.
The place, of course, is better known as a baseball stadium (many would call it a shrine or a cathedral), the place which one of the world's most famous franchises calls home, the New York Yankees. 2008 will be Yankee Stadium's last hurrah, and frankly, no place could ever replace it. 2009 will usher in a new entrant into an elite club of billion dollar stadiums, and this will be a baseball facility with no equal. The time to welcome this new stadium will come in due time, but for now I will meekly remember the old one, as it sits on 161st Street & River Avenue in the Bronx, once again for the last time.
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