Summer afternoons and baseball seem to go together. I went to my first Cubs game when I was ten. Going with my Uncle George to the friendly confines of Wrigley Field was an initiation experience as surely as my first pair of nylon stockings or my first kiss. I got to learn how to fill out a score card and how to find my seat from the ticket stub. I remember watching in amazement at how slight, but deceptively muscular, old men carried cases of beer (or Pepsi or insulated metal boxes of hot dogs) up and down long sets of stairs. Equipped with a miniature wooden paddle (think cross between popsicle stick and tongue depressor), it seemed like it took hours to eat my first Frosty Malt. I simply relished each spoonful. There was so much to take in; the white numbers that marked the distance from home plate shining through swatches of ivy along the red brick outfield walls, how a man in the scoreboard would put new numbers up –by hand, no less — at the end of every inning, updating the crowd on hits and runs and pitching changes.

A lifelong Cubs fan, I finally made it to Comiskey Park on the south side the season before they tore it down. I have gone to a select few Sox games since. (Who could resist Elvis Impersonator Night when Vegas-era Elvis lookalikes parachute onto the field and the stands are filled with father and son duos sporting fake sideburns?) But for most of my life, I have been pretty much a one-ballpark woman. To me, the idea of going to a baseball game meant going to Wrigley Field.

I was very excited to have the chance to see the Cubs play the Brewers at Miller Park in Milwaukee. This was going to be one of the highlights of my Wisconsin excursion with John. I had never gone to a stadium in another team’s town before. I had never gone to a ballpark to root for the visitors.

Certainly, there are many great rivalries in baseball. When the St. Louis Cardinals come to Chicago to play the Cubs, I smile at all the red-shirted fans that come up for the weekend to cheer them on. They’ll spill out of already crowded subway cars as they travel from downtown hotels to Wrigleyville then, after the ninth inning, roam the streets looking for the best place to get Chicago style deep dish pizza.

But I think the Cubs-Brewers meetings are sort of special. Their face-offs don’t have an especially long history, but the two teams’ home fields are only 83 miles apart.

Oh, and there was so much to take in at Miller Park. Once we parked the car, we decided to walk to the main gate and check out the statues of Robin Yount and Hank Aaron, two of the town’s greatest. John took a picture of me with Brett Wurst, one of the five sausage mascots that race before the seventh inning at all Brewers’ home games. Brats were getting coated with mustard. Kids were swinging away in arcade batting cages along the perimeter of the stadium. The park’s retractable roof was open. It was a sunny, seventy-five degree day and the beer was flowing. You guessed it. Miller Beer.

We had great seats in what they called the loge section, between the first and second tiers, along the third base line. I studied the scorecard for a while, wanting to get familiar with the players, although I wasn’t really committed to recording the results of each at bat throughout the game. I looked at the stands around me. Sure enough, I was in a sea of navy and gold jerseys sporting Ryan Braun’s and Prince Fielder’s numbers. But it was not difficult to spot Cub fans either. They, too, were wearing their colors proudly. There were lots of red and blue Cub logo topped caps in the crowd, and Chicago fans that sported the bright white, lightly pin-striped, uniform shirt — they sort of glowed.

What a great feeling it is to be somewhere and be able to spot your people so easily. It is easy to recognize your brothers and sisters as a visitor in a foreign ballpark. And when I saw my fellow Cub fans, I recognized that we all remembered the Bartman ball incident that derailed the Cubs championship campaign in 2003. We had all contemplated the Billy Goat curse. We all had a favorite Jack Brickhouse or Harry Caray homerun call, and we all missed Ron Santo.

I really enjoyed taking in everything I saw at Miller Park. As a visitor, everything was new to me; in the park and on the field. I noticed the different traffic patterns around the restrooms and saw some novel souvenirs displayed in the gift shops. In the stands, I made sure I located all the electronic signs that featured the ball and strike count. I practically stared through the 6000 square foot, 10 million dollar scoreboard, the third largest in baseball. It seemed like a good focal point for infinite amusement. In mega mega watt illuminating power, it flashed images of the current batter along with his stats or showed replays of arguably close calls.

And then I thought about the great old green scoreboard back at Wrigley, how fascinated I was with it in 1967, at my first game, how knowing there was a man walking through its guts changing the game stats by hand, felt like magic in it own way.

Being a “visitor” anywhere and being conscious of how the experience can make you feel like you’re ten years old again, when you saw or did something for the very first-time, is no small thing.