“We may never get the chance again.”

That’s what I kept telling myself Thursday night, looking at StubHub to see what tickets were available for Saturday’s Game 6 of the National League Championship Series. By Friday, I had bought tickets for my 13-year-old daughter Zayley and me to watch our beloved Atlanta Braves try to finish off the Los Angeles Dodgers and qualify for the World Series for the first time since 1999.

We created a Spotify playlist special for the occasion — complete with Queen’s “We Are the Champions,” though we refused to listen to that song on the way there so as not to jinx the hoped-for victory. Superstition in baseball is sacred. The wrong shirt, wrong pair of socks, wrong pregame meal, presumptuous radio listening — anything could derail this. We weren’t taking any chances.

Ah, the tortured Braves who have spent more than three decades torturing me. My dad and I started watching them in 1991, when I was 7, and their games were regular viewing in my Arkansas home every season until they were taken off TBS. When I moved to Mississippi in 2013, Zayley and I started watching them together on TV. She now shares the oft painful love for the perennial almost-champions and the fiery, unquenchable hate for their perennial spoilers, Those Damn Dodgers.

We loaded the car Saturday and headed east, and by 6 p.m., two hours before the game, we settled into our seats with our hot dog, burger, pretzel, et al.

Not long after, a woman in her 30s, her son in tow — who I’m guessing was 8 or 9 — came and sat in two seats beside us. She was from L.A. but moved to Georgia 17 years ago and married her husband, a Georgia native and avid Braves fan. She told me her husband died last year. She didn’t say how, and it seemed too awkward to ask.

Maybe it was COVID. Maybe he was in the service. She seemed very verklempt during any stadium ceremony where veterans, or the country in general, were honored.

In any case, this was her son’s first Major League Baseball game to attend, and they had spent hours walking around the stadium, taking it all in and snapping a few photos, before the game began.

Turning from them, I huddled with Zayley. We talked strategy. How would our starting pitcher do? How many innings did we need from him? Likewise, what about the Dodgers’ starter? He was pitching on short rest for only the second time in his career. We agreed our boys should get to him early and put the game away fast.

As the game was about to start, and all 43,000-plus rowdy and Chop-happy Braves fans were ready to explode at the first sign of a good baseball night, Travis Tritt performed “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which ended with a flurry of fireworks shooting from behind the stadium’s scoreboard.

The voice of the boy beside me pierced through it all.

“Dad would love this!” he told his mom jubilantly.

“Yeah he would,” she agreed, laughing, but her eyes seemed to shift to looking 10,000 miles into the distance.

And there it was. Shattering my belief that the result of the game mattered, came the cold, harsh realities of life, mortality, time and the uncertainty attached to all of the above.

How difficult it must be for that mother to be a 30-something widow raising an elementary-age son. How heartbreaking it must be for the son to miss his father and cope daily with his absence. How hollow baseball seemed pondering that.

Yet, there they were, at the baseball park, honoring the man who couldn’t be there with them. The mother told me her husband, who was Black, grew up idolizing Hank Aaron’s legacy and using it to fuel his own aspirations as a minority growing up in the South. Doubtless, the young boy will do the same but will use what he saw, and what he’ll be told, of his father as the template.

Come to think of it, baseball — and an exciting playoff game at Truist Park — provided a perfect backdrop for creating a memory that could be inextricably linked with that process.

Our parents won’t be here forever. Nor will any of the rest of us. Tomorrow is promised to no one. If the past year and a half has taught us anything, it should be that. Let’s not waste the time we have or any opportunities to make memories with our loved ones. Even small things can resonate as very important one day.

On Saturday, Zayley and I screamed our heads off and watched the Braves actually win the pennant. That, at least to me, was a big thing.

Zayley, of course, chalked up the whole experience to something much smaller.

“We waited to listen to ‘We Are the Champions’ until the ride home,” she kept telling her mom and sisters after we returned. “And it worked!”

Zack Plair is managing editor of The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.