The Antietam Drive Sports Complex
An ode to the only road I've ever known
written by Mike on February 15, 2025

Well, The Internet, we sure have been through a lot together. It's only now that I've spent the last week uploading my entire three years' worth of writing archives (well, save for a few dated things I wanted to intentionally "go missing") to P-boi that I realize that. For the last three years, I've written tributes to the things I grew up with & haven't let go of... but I haven't really written about my childhood, save for like one article. Actually, after looking at my old=lol archives, I'd say you really only know about half the pre-Boi, pre-Fireball story of Mike... & the half I consider the boring details half at that.

So this week, I'm taking a break from the parodies & nigh-obligatory Zelda references to introduce you to the side of me you never got to know, a boy defined by the street he lived on & the games he played on it.

Antietam Drive. To the untrained eye, it's just a quiet, rain-soaked suburban Jersey road on a rather warm February morning. To a man whose lived almost his entire life on this road, save for the first few weeks of infancy & four years of college not in a row, it's the still remains of an Olympianesque game arena. Sure, there are still children who live on this street, & I'm sure they love it dearly, if not now then when it's their turn to grow up. But they don't play on every square inch of it like my friends & I did. They can't look at that picture & point out at least 5 prime hiding spots. Or a bike ramp, or a finish line, or second base. Not that it's totally their fault. The bike ramp, for one, isn't there anymore.

Once upon a time, my neighborhood was home to the most crooked sidewalks I've ever seen. My street alone was home to several blocks that arched up high enough to serve its purpose as a ramp for bicycles & skateboards alike. Now this section across the street from my house is the closest thing you'll find to a crooked walkway.

The rest have been repaved with discolored blocks of clean, straight pavement. Gone are the chalk markings that recorded our personal distance records. Gone, too, is the wooden tile garage door with faint markings from tennis balls we threw at it during countless games of our favorite made up sport, Suicide.

Actually, I don't think there's single spot left that's suitable enough for the game. I can walk down my street & point out all of the once best locales, but they've all either gotten new garage doors, or new siding, or a new family whom I assume would appreciate it if a group of twentysomethings didn't bounce tennis balls off the side of their house.

One.	Two.	Three.	Four.	Five.	Six.

Yes, that last one is the inside of my own garage. I don't go around at 9:00 in the frigging morning taking pictures of the inside of other people's car holds. Shit, I felt dorky enough taking the other pictures outside after everybody else had gone to work. Rest assured that I was in my own backyard to take that one.

Which brings me to my backyard. You trendy little art rock wannabes have all seen the movie Garden State, right? Remember the part where they bury the gerbil in the backyard? If you take away the little house pet cemetery, every backyard in the state of New Jersey used to look just like that. Then like half of us got in-ground pools.

My house, being conveniently located at the center of the street, became the number one meeting place during the summer months. So the pool played host to about a dozen water games, from water polo (or as I liked to call it, nearly drown as you're trying to score in the deep end goal as you & 3 other kids fight for the ball), to baseball (which never lasted more than a few innings, because we kept hitting the ball over the neighbor's fence), to a water variation of the game Run the Bases (cleverly titled Swim the Bases).

There was once a time, before the pool, that my backyard was not a sports complex. It was a war torn battlefield. At the site of this dormant little garden once stood four evergreen bushes that looked like a set of giant teeth. So we'd trek up through Green Teeth Mountain, all suited up in our plastic guns & hand grenades. And every time a helicopter of any sort flew overhead, we'd assume it was an army chopper full of troops & we'd call out "Hey buddies!" The naivety of a child is so adorable sometimes.

The other guys would all have toy machine guns, & I'd be there with my Lazer Tag gun or my grey Nintendo Zapper. Then I'd make everyone pretend that I was a new recruit that just parachuted in with my fancy looking laser gun. God, an ego in the making. So there we were, hunting down an invisible enemy. Yeah, we were all the "good guys." It made things easier that way. No kid wanted to be on the side that lost, because then they'd have to come up with some stupid excuse for not dying. Nope, you didn't kill me, because I'm wearing special tech shield armor that's impenetrable by bullets or anything else you might have with you!

To our credit, it wasn't all gung-ho, G.I. Joe, win every battle happy fun time in our army. We peeked in enough times on our parents watching MASH reruns & episodes of Tour of Duty (or as one kid jokingly called it, Tour of Dookie, get it like poop lol) to know better. We spent a good deal of time treating the wounded & carrying around casualties. We may not have known what we were even fighting for, but at least we knew that the bad guys didn't always have terrible aim. Also, I liked watching the Tour of Dookie better when it came around again in 1994.

We even used our tree fort as a hospital base. Of course, by "tree fort," I mean "a couple of planks of wood nailed to tree branches & a few more smaller ones on the bottom of the trunk, so the smaller kids could climb up." It was nothing impressive. It was the complete opposite of impressive. But as long as it made sitting up in a tree a tad more comfortable, we didn't care.

There was a more impressive structure back behind that bushy tree. It looked like a wrestling steel cage, except made of wooden planks. And when we weren't just sitting on top of it, hanging out, we were using it for that exact purpose. The wrestling cage, I mean.

That open yard behind the two houses also served as one of several football fields. As did this...

and this...

The bottom one is the view from my driveway, an area that I think served as a field for every sport possible. Football & suicide we've seen. The street was also used for occasional hockey games, but mostly for X-Game wannabe skateboard & bike trick sessions. The driveway, itself, was first & foremost a basketball court.

Our hoops games, though frequent, were nothing special to write about here. Except for the one time when we had a new mailman for like a week, & he made a shot from where X marks the spot. To this day, whenever we talk about the basketball court that is my driveway, the legendary mailman's shot comes up.

After dinner, my front porch there became the jail for a nighttime game of what we called Jailbreak, & what you probably know as Manhunt or Freedom or Spring... or whatever you called the "1-2-3 you're my man no breaksies" variation of tag with teams. Odd how an entire country of children can play the same game & call it by a different name. Not as odd as the fact that an entire country of children used to pretend that the floor was lava & the couch was some kind of magic, lava-resistant boat, but still something of note.

My brother & I could never be on the same team, because he was the best at catching people, & I was the best at hiding. Once there was a giant pile of fallen tree branches & bushes here that I hid in for hours before everyone gave up & went inside. I felt like the king of hiding that night.

Then the next morning I found out that the reason they didn't look in the bush I was in was because there was poison ivy mixed in there.

I'll take all these memories with me whenever I leave Antietam Drive, but the times I'll probably remember the most are the baseball games. Alright, I'll remember making out with girls on the lawn the most, but baseball will be a reasonably close second.

We played baseball anywhere & everywhere we could find enough space, but the most used spot, by far, was the one below on the intersecting Constitution Road. Yeah, all the streets in my neighborhood are named after things from American history. Antietam Drive is named after the creek along which the bloodiest battle of the Civil War took place. Also nearby are Lincoln, Washington & Kennedy. I was friends with a history major that got a little too excited when I gave her directions through my neighborhood to my house.

Home plate was a break in the asphalt along where the closest car on the right is. The generation of kids before us even spray painted "HOME PLATE" in awesome graffiti letters on it. When they went to college, we claimed the field as our own. The spray painted squares where the bases were have long been eroded away, but I can still point out exactly where they are. First base is about a foot or two down from the edge of the driveway on the right. Second base is where that faint puddle is at the intersection. Third base is about where that fence starts. That fence used to be bright red. No, it wasn't painted over... it's just frigging old.

My friend's great-grandmother used to live there. Little old Italian woman. She was awesome, because she had no problem with us hopping the fence & getting our foul balls. I think that's how every kid judges their neighbors... over whether or not they'll let you get your stuff back that you throw over there. If anything, we were more pissed off with going through the trouble of getting our balls back, & fighting over how many fouls a player should get before they're out. Now that I think about it, I don't think we ever finished a game. Arguing over foul balls & do-overs seemed to always cut them short.

Ah, I know this post may not have been very exciting for you to read, but it was important for me to share the other side of my childhood that I never bothered to write about before. That, plus I didn't want everyone to think that I spent the entire 1980s inside, glued to the television with a Nintendo controller in one hand & a McDonald's Happy Meal in the other. Even if dear old TV was, indeed, my beloved third parent, there is nothing from my youth that I hold more dearly than the outdoor world that was & is Antietam Drive. It is the eternal home of my yesteryear... my Astoria, my Hogwarts, my abandoned subway station in the sewer, my shark cage THAT I'M ABOUT TO JUMP OVER!

WHOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAA!