I still treasure the memories of the two decades that elapsed between the end of my childhood and my reluctantly becoming an adult. I spent 15 of those years calling radio play-by-play for several different minor league professional baseball teams, which was just one of the reasons I jumped at the opportunity last week to visit Cooperstown, New York with a friend. In order to make our excursion to the nominal birthplace of America’s National Pastime seem a little less self-indulgent each of us brought a 9-year-old son along for the seven-hour ride.

I first visited Cooperstown 41 years ago. My father, a casual baseball fan at best, was sent by his employer and/or divine providence to handle a technology problem in the basement of the village’s palatial lakefront hotel, the Otesaga, and nobly took his two sons and a nephew along for the ride. Each morning that week he reported for work promptly at 8, leaving his three young charges (ages 12, 11, and 11) in town to entertain themselves for the day. Today such an arrangement would probably result in child abandonment charges, but in 1969 faith and trust trumped fear and paranoia in much of America, Cooperstown included.

Prior to last week’s visit the last time I’d been in the Baseball Hall of Fame was in 2001. I was accompanied on that occasion by six Portland Sea Dog players. Today many of the town’s memorabilia shops display figurines of one of that sextet, Josh Beckett, clad in a miniature Boston Red Sox jersey.

On my initial visit Cooperstown seemed like a giant candy store, but one at which I couldn’t buy anything, limited as I was to 25 cents worth of walking-around money.

Last week I had significantly more than a quarter in my pocket, but purchasing items in one of Cooperstown’s numerous nostalgia emporiums wasn’t any easier than it had been 41 years earlier. In 1969 I lacked the money necessary to purchase anything; last week I had sufficient funds, but the sticker shock I experienced when examining the price of vintage Milwaukee Braves hats or Kansas City Monarchs jerseys was enough to cause temporary paralysis in my wallet-opening hand. One other observation: if someone previously unfamiliar with Major League Baseball were to spend five days wandering in and out of the many souvenir stores in Cooperstown, at week’s end he or she would have a hard time naming any big league baseball teams besides the Red Sox, the New York Yankees, and the New York Mets.

We visited quaint Doubleday Field, where many of baseball’s immortals at one time or another showed their stuff in the Hall of Fame game, an annual contest between two randomly selected major league teams which for many years was played in late July or early August. Unfortunately that time-honored ritual came to an end two years ago when the combined forces of the Major League Baseball Players Association and the owners of the ballclubs put a permanent kibosh on it, deciding the risk of injury to one of the participants in a mere exhibition game was far too great to allow the tradition to persevere. However, the custom has continued, sort of; it now consists of a for-fun game on Father’s Day weekend involving some of the more recent Cooperstown inductees. And it’s not only the players who are part of baseball history; the first-base side seating at Doubleday consists of the former football bleacher seats used at Fenway Park, where the then-Boston Patriots played their home games for awhile prior to fleeing for Foxborough in 1971.

Hair-splitters, nitpickers, sticklers for proven facts and other spoilsports are quick to point out that baseball may not have begun in a Cooperstown-area field; in fact, knowledgeable historians doubt the town had anything to do with the game’s origin. But it’s also doubtful George Washington really cut down his father’s cherry tree, let alone piously admitted to doing it because he “could not tell a lie.” Similarly, it’s highly unlikely Paul Bunyan ever existed, and even less plausible Davy Crockett “kilt him a bar when he was only three.” Yet such fables that persist, even those which are clearly embellished, ultimately become treasured bits of Americana.

In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really matter whether or not Babe Ruth called his shot, Jimmie Foxx was first discovered by a scout who observed him lift a plow with one hand, or if the first baseball game wasn’t really played in Elihu Phinney’s pasture after Abner Doubleday had chased the farmer’s cows away. That such stories (and the places like Cooperstown that spawned them) have endured is part of what makes them folklore, and worth revisiting over and over again.

— Andy Young teaches in Kennebunk, and lives in Cumberland.