I already alluded to this Onion article about adult kickball. But then, lying in bed last night, I began thinking about my 2004-2005 tenure with the World Adult Kickball Association’s Chicago Deep Dish league.

Those were heady days: three consecutive seasons of truly horrid playing on my part and raucous postgame summits at the bars whose owners probably could not fucking believe they sponsored an adult kickball league.

We first convened at Carol’s Pub in Uptown, just across the street from Chase Park, where we played. Carol’s was a country-western themed bar that was frequently by actual Southerners, along with the occasional hipster and/or kickball league. A couple seasons later we moved to the Four Treys in Roscoe Village and THE RAIL in Ravenswood, a sports bar whose name I wouldn’t remember if it weren’t printed on the back of one of my WAKA t-shirts and where I once employed the TV-B-Gone I carried on my keychain to hilarious effect, because I am an asshole.

There was a lot of drinking, a lot of a coed adult sport taken far too seriously by twenty- and thirtysomethings, infinite rounds of flip cup, and a lot of hungover Wednesday mornings. And it’s one of those things that, even though it was only four or five years ago, feels like it occurred in a different lifetime. Chicago was where the highest percentage of my friends lived at the time, and 99.9% of them played on my team. Which meant that every Tuesday night I got to see pretty much all of my friends.

The Onion article made me laugh because, as usual, it was spot-on. Then it got me waxing nostalgic and looking at some old photos. But it wasn’t until late last night that I remembered a specific moment from a postgame wingding at Carol’s in July 2004. I was either sitting at the bar or ordering a drink when I looked up at one of the televisions (I did not yet possess a TV-B-Gone at that point, or the compulsion to use it in this context). It was tuned to the Democratic National Convention and its keynote speaker, a young Illinois state senator whose strange name I’d heard maybe twice before, tops.

And I feel kind of sheepish for not realizing, until I was on the edge of sleep last night, the serendipity inherent in our team’s name:

Can We Kick it? Yes We Can.