Hip! Hip! Jorge!

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My beloved Yankees are reeling.

Now that's great news to some of you, but I have a feeling that my 27-time World Champions will be back and you'll hear from me soon enough. Yet on the week when some kid called me 'old dude', I must admit that the struggles of Jorge Posada and to some extent, Derek Jeter, have been tough to watch.

You see Jorge and Derek, along with Pettite and Rivera all landed on the team within weeks of each other in 1995. Should I go through the list of things they did together?

Why not? It's fun for me and agony for all the Yankee haters out there.

They won it all in 1996, 1998, 1999 and 2000 (when they beat the crap out of the Mets). They made it to the series in 2001 and 2003. They battled an obviously cheating Red Sox team in '04 and '07. They won it all again in '09 - a year when they had to win it all.

In that time, I went from being a pathetic, young, lonely single man with a head of hair that was holding on, and something of a waist line to a pathetic, old dude, happily married man with 3 kids, a beautiful wife, hair that continued to leave and a waist line that got bumped up a little.

My kid got real sick. I lost a brother, a father, and a huge part of my innocence and excitement for a lot of things.

And through it all, there was always the core four. Winning, battling, allowing me a few moments of peace.

This year Andy quit. Late last year and early this year Jeter struggled. Posada's batting average is currently hovering around my weight from my senior year in high school. He's going to have to get real hot to get to where I am now.

Rivera? Ah, he's still the best. But he may not be human.

And my point being?

Time waits for no one. Picture Mickey Mantle in your head.

I bet you see him as the young, strong man who hits the ball to the moon and runs like a deer.

He isn't even with us now. He died of liver failure due to his lifelong abuse of booze. He didn't die young and strong and agile.

Last week Jeter his two home runs and went 4 for 5. The New York Post ran an article that proclaimed, 'He's back!'

Most likely, he's not.

And that's okay.

To everything there's a season.

If a genie were to pop out of a bottle and say...I can take you back to 1994 when you could run faster, had more hair and were eternally single with little chance of ever finding as much love as you've found...would I do it?

It may be tempting on some levels, but the life is found in the living, and despite the pain (the unbelieveable pain, actually) there is so much more there to grab ahold of.

Hip! Hip! Jorge!

Aging is inevitable. Sit back and enjoy it.

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