For more than 25 years, some of reality TV’s most memorable—and villainous—contenders have declared that they’re “not here to make friends.” But on The Golden Bachelorette, the second Bachelor-franchise installment focused on a romantic lead older than 60, friendship isn’t a fruitless distraction from the main event. The new series follows the 61-year-old widow Joan Vassos and an eclectic group of men hoping to win her over—some of whom have also lost their spouse. In a pleasant break from standard reality-TV convention, including within the Bachelor franchise, many of the show’s most charming moments focus on the friendships formed among Joan’s suitors.

By highlighting the men’s bonds with one another, the new series builds on The Golden Bachelor’s refreshing exploration of finding love after grief, and the ways a person’s identity can shift in late adulthood. Together, the men wrestle with profound changes brought on by widowhood, retirement, divorce, and other big transitions. In its inaugural season, The Golden Bachelorette has offered a rare window into some of the distinct social and emotional challenges that Americans encounter later in life—and the varied connections that help them mitigate such weighty stressors.

Last year, Joan was an early favorite on The Golden Bachelor, where she quickly captured the septuagenarian widower Gerry Turner’s interest. But after just three episodes, the mother of four walked away from the show to care for her newly postpartum daughter. Yet being on the program offered Joan an emotional reward beyond finding a permanent partner. During her brief time as a contestant, “My heart kind of got a little fix from Gerry,” she said during a tearful exit. “As you get older, you become more invisible. People don’t see you anymore.” Her words resonated with many Golden Bachelor viewers, especially franchise newcomers and other women around her age. Now, with Joan at the fore, The Golden Bachelorette sheds light on the inner complexities of the men who are hoping she’ll see them. And by turning its attention to the unlikely intimacy forged among the male contestants, the show pushes beyond the one-dimensional stoicism that’s common in depictions of men their age.

Most of the two dozen men competing for Joan’s affections, who are between 57 and 69, have experienced bereavement or devastating heartbreak. Although the world of The Golden Bachelorette—where the suitors live with one another under the same roof—is obviously a staged environment, the losses the contestants have suffered are very real: As of 2023, more than 16 percent of Americans who are 60 or older (about 13 million people) were widowed. Losing a spouse has tremendous consequences for the surviving partner’s physical, mental, and emotional health—which can begin even prior to bereavement, especially for caregiving spouses. And yet, “we as a society are not necessarily super skilled and comfortable at talking about death and loss,” Jane Lowers, an assistant professor at Emory University School of Medicine, told me. “Some people will back away from engaging with somebody who’s going through grief.” A partner’s death can also lead to a crisis of self, she added, if the bereaved spouse had come to see caregiving, or being half of a marital unit, as their essential identity.

On The Golden Bachelorette, loss largely brings people together, even as it prompts difficult internal reckonings. Many of Joan’s most meaningful conversations with her suitors make reference to her late husband, the milestones they shared, and her conflicting feelings as she attempts to find love again. But even when she isn’t around, the men speak candidly about grief—Joan’s, as well as their own. When one suitor announces that he’s leaving the mansion because his mother died, the others rally around him, with some tearing up as they offer their condolences and reflect on how beautiful his interactions with Joan have been.

[Read: Reality (TV) is getting kinder]

Another moving exchange involves a widower named Charles, who has spent almost six years racked with guilt, wondering if he could’ve done something to save his wife from a fatal brain aneurysm. Speaking with Guy, an emergency-room doctor, Charles shares that one detail of his wife’s death has always troubled him—and he looks visibly relieved when Guy reassures him, after explaining the science, that there was nothing he could have done. Later, as Charles recalls this conversation when talking with Joan, he tells her that “it changed my life.” These scenes aren’t just a striking contrast to the hostile atmosphere that’s typical of many dating-oriented competition series in which the contestants spent time together; they’re also an instructive representation of relationship-building among older men. Rather than peaceably keeping to themselves, the Golden Bachelorette men prioritize vulnerability and openness with one another. “I came in, arrived at the mansion with sadness, missed my wife,” Charles says when he leaves midway through the season. “After several weeks here at the mansion, it really helped me … the remaining friends, we bond together. We opened our hearts.”

The silent anguish that Charles describes has dangerous real-world ramifications: After the death of a spouse, widowers experience higher rates of mortality, persistent depression, and social isolation than widows do. “It’s in part because they don’t have these close friendships like we’re seeing on the show,” Deborah Carr, a sociology professor at Boston University and the author of Golden Years? Social Inequality in Later Life, told me. “Their social ties often were through work, and then that diminishes once they retire—or their former wives did the role.”

But widowers aren’t the only demographic represented on The Golden Bachelorette. And today’s older Americans have far more complex social lives than in years past, partly because marriage, companionship, and caregiving all look different—and, often, less predictable—than they did several decades ago. Now about 36 percent of adults who get divorced are older than 50, a rising phenomenon known as gray divorce. As Carr put it, “We’re certainly moving away from that ‘one marriage for life’”—which shifts how single adults past 50 see their romantic prospects.

The Golden Bachelorette chronicles what it takes for contestants to open themselves up to love, romantic or otherwise. As these changes happen in real time, the show keeps an eye toward the importance of emotional transparency when navigating later-in-life relationships. The men on the show sometimes acknowledge that they were raised to feel uncomfortable with overt displays of sentimentality, but they appear to recognize the long-term toll of suppressing their feelings. Carr added that she was pleased to see how quickly a group of men with so little in common came to embrace one another. “Even though it’s an artificial situation,” she noted, “a lot of those lessons can be imported to other men.”

On The Golden Bachelor, the isolated production environment ended up nudging the women toward one another, too. “We were all sequestered in this mansion without our phones and television and social media, so it made it very easy to connect with people very quickly at a deep level,” Kathy Swarts, one of the contestants, told me. When we spoke, Kathy was just leaving Pennsylvania, where she’d been visiting Susan Noles, one of her closest friends from The Golden Bachelor. Both told me, in separate conversations, that they counted joining the show as a transformative choice, and that their age also gave them a unique perspective on discovering love—whether with Gerry or with new friends. For Susan, watching the men navigate the same journey has been fascinating—and it’s different from watching the franchise’s earlier seasons, or other reality shows, because the contestants are mostly parents and grandparents.

“We’ve given our lives to our children,” Susan explained, adding that younger contestants have “not experienced what we have—we’ve had the ups, the downs, the horrible, the broken hearts, the happy moments.” By the time they enter the mansion, the Golden contestants largely know who they are and what they want. That changes what it means to win: Though they may not come to the show looking for new platonic bonds, we see the participants recognize the beauty of forging friendships with peers who meet them as individuals—not as extensions of their families or employers. This season’s men may have begun as strangers, but they leave The Golden Bachelorette having found a “group of brothers,” as one departing participant calls his competitors.

Contra Donald Trump’s claims, Vice President Kamala Harris is not a Communist. For one, no evidence suggests that she seeks the collectivization of the means of production, or even that she is especially hostile to corporate America. When outlining her vision for an “opportunity economy,” Harris speaks of “a future where every person has the opportunity to build a business, to own a home, to build intergenerational wealth.” This is rhetoric that brings to mind George W. Bush’s “ownership society,” not the liquidation of the kulaks.

Granted, we’re not obliged to take Harris’s campaign pronouncements at face value, and there is no question that she has supported a number of policies that place her firmly on the left of the Democratic Party. But since emerging as President Joe Biden’s chosen successor, Harris has jettisoned her past support for Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, the Zero-Emission Vehicles Act, a ban on fracking, and the decriminalization of illegal border crossings, conspicuously distancing herself from the ideological commitments of her short-lived 2020 presidential campaign.

Moreover, Harris and her closest political allies, most notably her brother-in-law, the Uber executive Tony West, have made a concerted effort to cultivate influential CEOs and investors, many of whom have come away encouraged by her openness to their policy priorities. As if to demonstrate the seriousness of her pro-business pivot, Harris broke with Biden by proposing a more modest tax increase on capital gains and dividends. And while she continues to call for taxing the unrealized capital gains of households with more than $100 million in assets—a policy that is anathema to investors—the Dallas-based venture capitalist and entrepreneur Mark Cuban, perhaps her most visible champion in the business world, has flatly told CNBC “It’s not going to happen.”

So no, Harris is not a radical. But when she claims to be a pragmatic capitalist who will take “good ideas from wherever they come,” the pitch doesn’t quite land. How, then, should we understand her ideological sensibilities?

The most straightforward interpretation is that Harris is a Democratic Party loyalist who reliably moves in line with the evolving consensus among left-of-center interest groups, activists, intellectuals, donors, and campaign professionals. She stands in favor of whatever will keep the fractious Democratic coalition together. If the climate movement insists that fracking is an obstacle to the green-energy transition, she’ll take up their cause by backing a ban. If support for a fracking ban jeopardizes Democratic prospects in Pennsylvania, she’ll reverse her stance while underscoring that her values haven’t changed, careful not to rebuke the climate movement for its excesses. In this regard, Harris is strikingly similar to Biden, who has followed the Democratic consensus—to the right in the Bill Clinton era, to the left under Barack Obama and Trump—throughout his half century on the national political scene.

If I’m right, the good news is that a Harris victory wouldn’t mean the end of American capitalism. The bad news is that her lowest-common-denominator progressivism wouldn’t fix what’s broken with American capitalism either.

Before turning to the content of Harris’s economic agenda, it’s worth thinking through what we can learn from the arc of her political career.

Harris rose to prominence against the backdrop of the Silicon Valley wealth boom and the collapse of two-party politics in the Golden State in the 2000s and 2010s. Unlike Clinton, who, as governor of Arkansas, navigated the Reagan-era realignment of the South and had to learn to appeal to swing voters, Harris’s chief political challenge has been winning over enough California Democratic voters to deliver a majority.

With the notable exception of her 2010 race for attorney general, Harris managed to avoid facing off against a meaningful Republican challenger until she was named Biden’s running mate in 2020. She also seldom faced difficult fiscal trade-offs. As the district attorney of San Francisco and the attorney general of California, she was charged with making any number of important decisions but not with balancing budgets. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016, Harris’s tenure perfectly coincided with the Trump presidency, when the job of the junior senator from California was to be a voice of the anti-Trump resistance, not to strike bipartisan bargains.

One lesson from Harris’s political climb is that “reading the room” has proved to be a much better way to make friends in blue-state Democratic politics than making hard choices. No one can accuse Harris of ever having cut a social program or denied a public-sector union an item from its wish list, which is a very good place for a Democratic presidential candidate to be.

The downside, of course, is that we don’t have a good sense of whether Harris is capable of saying no to her political allies as Clinton, the architect of welfare reform, and Obama, who resisted calls for single-payer health care, did before her. Among Harris’s contemporaries, consider the contrasting political trajectory of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who has the distinct misfortune of having been a hard-nosed and highly effective governor of Rhode Island in the midst of a budget crisis, when she earned the lasting enmity of the Democratic left by saving her state from fiscal doom. That, I suspect, is why Raimondo is being discussed as a possible treasury secretary in a Harris administration and not the other way around.

Harris is not alone in evading hard choices. Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign has been defined by a series of improvisational policy initiatives—including “No tax on tips,” “No tax on overtime,” “No tax on Social Security for our great seniors”—which, taken together, would blow an enormous hole in federal revenues. Recently, the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget released a careful analysis of the fiscal impact of the Trump and Harris campaign plans, and it found that although Harris’s plan would increase projected deficits by $3.5 trillion over the next decade, Trump’s plan would increase them by $7.5 trillion. Given the unseriousness of so many of Trump’s tax and spending proposals, many have concluded that Harris is the more credible presidential candidate.  

But the closer you look at Harris’s economic agenda, the more the gap in seriousness between the two campaigns starts to shrink.

Shortly after the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget released its much-discussed analysis, Harris proposed an ambitious new Medicare benefit for home-based care on ABC’s daytime television program The View, a policy aimed at easing the burden of the “sandwich generation,” or working-age adults who find themselves caring for children and aging parents at the same time. This is a large and sympathetic group, and Harris deserves credit for speaking to its needs. From a fiscal perspective, however, the deficit-increasing impact of a new Medicare benefit along these lines could be in the trillions.

Though a number of press reports have suggested that a home-based-care benefit could cost $40 billion a year, drawing on a Brookings Institution précis of a “very-conservatively designed universal program” with strict eligibility limits, my Manhattan Institute colleague Chris Pope projects that it could cost more than 10 times that amount. Harris has suggested paying for this new benefit by having Medicare drive a harder bargain with pharmaceutical companies, but Pope estimates that that would yield no more than $4 billion a year in savings. At the high end, this proposal alone could see the deficit-increasing impact of Harris’s campaign plan surpass that of Trump’s.

Of course, much depends on the details of a new Medicare benefit, just as much depends on how Trump would operationalize his own scattershot campaign promises. Rather than offering a more sober approach, though, Harris is racing to outbid her Republican opponent. To swing voters who don’t have much faith in the federal government’s ability to spend money wisely or well—skepticism that I would argue is more than justified—Trump’s promise of further tax cuts might prove more resonant than Harris’s plans for an expanded welfare state.

If instead of just adding to the deficit Harris were to pay for all of this new spending, she would have to do much more than raise the corporate income tax or tax unrealized capital gains, the same tax that her admirers in the business community insist will never see the light of day. She’d have to break her pledge to shield households earning $400,000 or less from tax increases, a move that would be difficult to reconcile with the Democratic Party’s increasing dependence on upper-middle-income, stock-owning voters.

Harris does, however, have one way forward that could yield real political dividends. She just needs to say no.

Drawing from a wide range of progressive thinkers, the Harris campaign has embraced ambitious goals that enjoy considerable public support, including a revitalized manufacturing sector, abundant green energy and housing, and increased public support for low- and middle-income families with children. Yet remaking the American political economy along these lines will necessitate saying no to interest groups that wield enormous power within the Democratic coalition—unions demanding concessions that threaten to undermine a manufacturing revival, environmental-justice activists who oppose permitting reform, and welfarists who want to create new entitlements for the young without rightsizing existing entitlements for the old.

Judging by her past experience, Harris’s instinct will be to placate these constituencies, to take the path of least resistance when confronted by the Democratic left. That same ideological drift has plagued the Biden White House, and there is growing concern among Democrats that though voters might see Harris as younger and more vigorous than the incumbent president, they otherwise see her candidacy as representing more of the same. With early voting already under way in more than a dozen states, she’s running out of time to prove her doubters wrong.    

The Oakland Coliseum, where the Athletics played baseball for 57 years until last Thursday, is beautiful to me, in the subjective way that anything you have loved for a long time is beautiful. But the stadium is not, factually speaking, nice to look at. It is mostly concrete, with exposed rebar tracing the ceilings and water stains mottling the floor, and so dark in places that I’ve had to use a flashlight to see the ground in front of me. Because it was dug out from nearly 30 feet beneath the surrounding dirt, much of it sits damply below sea level, and because it was built to be shared with a football team, the Raiders, its field is rounder and has more foul territory than any other stadium in Major League Baseball.

The Coliseum’s best feature—a wide, almost decadent view of the golden Oakland hills—was intentionally blocked in the 1990s after the Raiders’ owner, Al Davis, demanded that the city build more seats in exchange for the team’s moving back from Los Angeles. (The government did, for half a billion dollars. In 2020, the Raiders moved to Las Vegas, shortly after the Golden State Warriors basketball team’s move from Oakland to San Francisco. Mount Davis—the monstrous slab of seats named, unofficially, after Al—remains.) The Coliseum regularly lands at the bottom of ballpark rankings and is often compared to a toilet bowl, even by people who like it. I have been watching the A’s play there my whole life, and it is one of my favorite places on Earth.

Being an A’s fan has always been painful in the ordinary way that being a baseball fan is painful. But in 2005, it started to become agonizing. John Fisher, a Giants fan whose parents founded the Gap, bought the team with Lewis Wolff as minority partner, and they quickly began trying to get out of the Coliseum. Like many MLB owners, they wanted the public to help pay for a change, via a new taxpayer-funded ballpark in a new location. But the city of Oakland, in a prolonged budget crisis partly stemming from the Mount Davis project, could not give Fisher (who is worth $3 billion) and Wolff everything they wanted.

[Read: Taxpayers are about to subsidize a lot more sports stadiums]

Over the next several years, especially after Fisher became sole owner of the team in 2016, the product he was offering began to deteriorate. Oakland had never been a big-money team, but its management started spending even less on players and player development. Ticket prices rose precipitously. The Coliseum fell further into disrepair. A’s leadership announced that the team would explore other markets. It seemed obvious what was happening, and not just because it was basically the plot of the movie Major League: Fisher was cynically and systematically working to make Oakland baseball harder to love and then blaming the fans for not loving it enough. He miscalculated: We loved Oakland baseball anyway—unconditionally. We just didn’t like him. Last year, the A’s had the lowest payroll in baseball. They also had a possum living in a broadcast booth and the lowest attendance of any team in the league. But on nights when the fans arranged it, the park was packed in reverse boycott, 27,000 people and hardly any official A’s gear in sight, just an ocean of kelly-green shirts with a message for Fisher: SELL.

Like all activism, this was love. Like all activism, this was wild optimism—a belief that enough people, working together, could make things different. “All baseball fans believe in miracles,” John Updike once wrote. “The question is, how many do you believe in?” Last spring, Fisher abruptly walked away from negotiations to keep the team in Oakland. (The mayor called it “a blindside” and accused Fisher of using the city as “leverage.”) No miracle had come. The A’s were leaving. They will now spend the next three years in Sacramento, sharing a stadium with the Giants’ Triple-A affiliate, before, in theory, moving into a $1.5 billion ballpark on the Las Vegas Strip that will be financed in large part by taxpayers and seems oriented toward casual, visiting fans who are looking for a vacation activity and don’t mind paying high ticket prices. (Ground has not been broken, but according to renderings, the park will be very shiny and have a view of the simulacral Statue of Liberty that fronts the New York–New York casino across the street.) Every MLB owner approved the move. It is the first time in two decades that one of their teams has relocated, and the first time in history that one has done so after such a fight with fans.

Those fans are mostly done with Major League Baseball. They’re airlifting their devotion to the local Pioneer League baseball team or to the independent soccer team that will play at the Coliseum next year. Oakland, a great sports city with a population roughly the size of Miami’s, has no more major professional sports.

Fisher almost never speaks to the press, but last week, he emailed a letter to fans attempting to explain himself. He wrote that he had always wanted “to win world championships and build a new ballpark in Oakland,” and that he and his colleagues “did our very best to make that happen.” I received this message while I was on the phone with Steven Leighton, a fan who had dedicated the past few years to persuading Fisher to sell, perhaps to one of the many people who had reportedly come out of the woodwork to express interest in buying the team and keeping it in Oakland. (Leighton was telling me about the time his dad took him out of school to watch the final game of the 2012 season, as a surprise.) That night, Larry Beil, a local news anchor, called the letter a “great work of fiction” and ripped it up on the air.

A stadium is a funny thing for anyone to own. It’s real estate, sure. But I can’t think of any other building that holds so many memories. The Oakland Coliseum hosted 4,493 regular-season games, 61 playoff games, and one All-Star Game. It is where a batboy got the nickname MC Hammer, where a platinum-blond cheerleader called Krazy George invented the Wave, and where Rickey Henderson set a league record for stolen bases that still stands. It is where, on Mother’s Day 2010, Dallas Braden pitched the 19th perfect game in baseball history, in front of 12,000 people, every last one of them holding their breath; afterward, he scooped his grandmother, who had raised him after his mom died, into a weepy bear hug on national TV. (I was watching, away at college, holding my breath too.)

Some memories are collective; others are personal. The Coliseum is where Esperanza Uruena went into labor and begged her husband not to make her leave, even as her insides twisted and cramped—Dave Stewart was pitching. It’s where my friend Rachael once threw out the first pitch with her daughter, Ynez, strapped to her chest; this past week, Ynez, suddenly 5, was in the parking lot wearing a traffic pylon like a witch’s hat and waving a SELL flag. When I was a kid, my family and I would lay pilled blankets on the field after games and watch fireworks explode above us. I wrote in my diary after one of these nights that it was the happiest I had ever been. In our 20s, friends and I would sit 10 or 15 wide at weekend day games, cheap beers in our hands and feet up on the bleachers.

Ten years ago, the A’s played the Royals in a single-elimination wild-card game. It was in Kansas City, but I watched in Oakland, in a dive bar so crowded, I could barely move my arms, with a friend I’d been to a couple of games with. It was our first date. The A’s lost 9–8 in 12 innings. The next season, that man and I bought quarter-season tickets, and the season after that, and the season after that, touching knees in the right-field bleachers, April to October. The bleacher-dwellers have their rituals, and we were happy to submit: We clapped along with the drums and the cowbells, headbanged for Sean Doolittle, believed in Stephen Vogt. We watched as our favorite players left, traded away or given up to free agency. In 2015, the team entered a painful, protracted slide, and then—still among the worst-paid teams in baseball—they rallied to reach the playoffs for three seasons straight.

[Read: What Moneyball-for-everything has done to American culture]

During the last of those seasons, one shortened by plague and played in empty stadiums, we moved across the country. When baseball came back, we were somewhere else: We watched different teams, in different ballparks. We read the bad news coming out of Oakland. We had a baby, Bobby, in the middle of the postseason, and I listened to the World Series on the radio while I nursed in the dark. We loved our son without condition or limit, and then, just when we thought it was the happiest we’d ever been, we got even luckier: He became a baseball fan, running coffee-table bases on fat, unsteady toddler legs and begging to watch the highlights over breakfast. (He’s a New Yorker, so he roots for the Mets.)

This summer, we took Bobby to the Coliseum. We wanted him to see the place where his parents fell in love, and we wanted to chant “Let’s go, Oak-land!” one last time together. We sat in our usual spot: Section 149, among the drummers and the diehards, the people who reverse-boycotted and fought and still scream “Fuck you, Fisher” when their team scores a run. Since the deal had become final, their ranks had thinned considerably. “I had to be here as much as I could, but everyone grieves in different ways,” Esperanza Uruena told me that afternoon. But we got to see some old friends, and our son got a certificate that said MY FIRST A’S GAME, which we joked we should take a Sharpie to—add and last. Bobby, one and a half, did not understand the significance of anything, but he had a great time watching the game. His dad and I both cried.

In the face of the ineffable, A’s fans have been grasping for metaphor. Thursday was a funeral; no, a funeral for someone whose death was preventable; no, a funeral for someone who’d been murdered, and the killer was charging admission at the door. The Coliseum, meanwhile, is Baseball’s Last Dive Bar. It’s home. It’s a concrete cathedral—which is maybe a little grandiose for a place with so many sewage problems and such stubborn possums, but I like it. Mircea Eliade, the great religious scholar and historian, spent years trying to understand precisely what makes something holy, why people chose to pour their faith into certain containers and not others. His conclusion, ultimately, was that sacredness is defined subjectively and circularly: The sacred is that which is not profane, and the profane is that which is not sacred. The believer gets to decide, in other words, where and when and how she finds what Eliade called hierophany: the manifestation of the divine, the moment when an ordinary object ceases to be ordinary.

I had learned about Eliade and hierophany from the book Baseball as a Road to God, co-authored by the former New York University president John Sexton. Last week, I spoke with Sexton by phone. He is incredibly smart and kind, even though he’s a Yankees fan, and he could probably tell that I was a wreck. He told me a story about a trip he’d taken some years ago, to Australia. With a guide, he and his family went to Uluru, the giant sandstone monolith that rises out of the flatness of the outback like a breaching whale and is a religious site for the Aboriginal Pitjantjatjara people. “To our native Australian guide,” he told me, the rock “was the most sacred place in the world.” To Sexton and his family, “it was a beautiful, overwhelming natural wonder, but it wasn’t ‘sacred.’” These places are not intrinsically sacred—they’re sacred if, and only as long as, living people see them as such, find miracles in their presence. I think Sexton had intended to make me feel better, to help me understand that the Coliseum could be divine as long as I wanted it to be. Instead, I thought about Bobby, who will never remember the mighty Oakland A’s, oblivious and happy as his parents wept at the ballpark, and about all the people who had consecrated the Coliseum, only to see it abandoned and emptied out.

[Read: Baseball is broken]

A regular football season is 17 games. Regular basketball and hockey seasons are each 82 games. A regular professional baseball season is 162 games, 81 of which are played at home. Esperanza Uruena missed only nine this season. Baseball—like falling in love, or raising a child—is mostly about the choice to keep showing up. It makes the mundane holy, through repetition and commitment, attention that becomes devotion, one day at a time, just like Mary Oliver said. It is ritualized submission to forces beyond your control, and as such, it is about the most radical, sacred, bighearted thing a person can do: Loving a team, like loving anything unconditionally, is the decision to make your world larger, even though it will hurt. Streaks end. Leads are blown while you get up for a beer. Your favorite guy gets traded, or injured, or sent down. A thing you organized your life around for years is taken away. The Oakland A’s were so much to so many of us, for so long, and now they are nothing at all.

But on Thursday, we were at the Coliseum, 46,899 of us—there to show that the A’s meant something to us, even if we didn’t mean anything to the A’s. Krazy George was there, signing autographs and banging a drum. So were Rickey Henderson and Dave Stewart, throwing out the first pitch, and Dallas Braden, now a color commentator, choking up in the booth. Rachael and her husband, Matt, were up in the 300s with their kids, and Esperanza was down near me in the bleachers, her fingernails painted green and gold. Women carried sleeping, floppy-limbed newborns—so their babies could see the place, just once, even with their eyes closed—and ushers carried bouquets of red roses given to them by fans. We chanted “Let’s go, Oak-land!” and “Sell! The! Team!,” our voices made louder bouncing off all that concrete. At some point, a beach ball appeared, and at some point afterward, once it had traveled hundreds of feet and fallen onto the field twice, it was euthanized with a pocketknife.

Oakland took the lead in the third and widened it in the fifth. By then, it was mayhem: Security guards had abandoned their posts to watch the game, and the aisles were clogged with bodies leaking sweat and tears. Smoke bombs, toilet paper, and two people escaped the stands and made their way onto the field. Someone in the bleachers unfurled a white banner so wide that five people had to hold it; in spiky, handwritten capital letters, it said UNFORGIVABLE. During the eighth inning, Kara Tsuboi—who has been an in-game announcer since 2009 and will not be going to Sacramento—thanked fans and staff. “This place is special,” she said. We got on our feet and didn’t sit back down.

Then, the ninth. The Rangers had scored, so we were ahead, but barely. Mason Miller struck out two back-to-back, then Travis Jankowski grounded to Max Schuemann at third base for an easy out. It was over, two hours and 29 minutes and 57 years after it had started. As the crowd cheered and the players shook hands, I ducked into a corridor to call Bobby. I told him I missed him, which was technically, though inadequately, true. He was in his hometown, playing with magnets, and I was in mine, pondering devotion, and I wanted so badly to be closer to him, I thought I might swallow my iPhone right there.

When I returned to the bleachers, almost everyone remained, chatting and hugging and taking selfies and looking out at the Coliseum, still the same and so, so beautiful. People pitched their torsos over the fence to pass the groundskeepers souvenir cups, empty water bottles, and Ziploc baggies to fill with dirt from the field. For anyone who wanted a different memento, a wide-necked guy in a Henderson jersey was demonstrating how to yank a cupholder off the seat. A final “Let’s go, Oak-land!” rose and fell: There weren’t enough people there anymore to make it last. A drummer in a bucket hat passed tissues to a crying security guard. At some point, the stadium music died. And then, about an hour after the game had ended, we had to go. We filed out of our seats and into those dark tunnels, holding our cups of dirt, the concrete under our feet scattered with toilet paper and rose petals.

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