It’s a busy night for overhearing weird things in the stands and on the street. The two women in the SRO section behind me and Heather are a whole post all by themselves; one of them says, and I regret to say that I wasn’t paying close enough attention to quote the rest of the conversation, “My grandma says they don’t make baseball pants like they used to,” and I can’t just let that go by. “What’s her opinion on that?” I ask. “Did she like them better back then, or now?” Of course she liked them better back then, the woman confirms, laughing. “They were tighter, showed off their buns more,” she explains. Obviously. She also tells her friend a story about a game where she was out of her seats for all the exciting parts: “So I got up to get a hot dog, and they made a home run, and then I came back and nothing happened for a while, and then I went to the bathroom and they made another home run and I missed it, and they didn’t get any more points for the rest of the game!” It makes me think of the way you’d unmask German spies in World War II, the little mistakes that aren’t technically wrong but are totally wrong.

Tonight I get to share with Heather one of my favorite ballpark experiences, the brisket sandwich from the Carvery. I’m pretty sure I’ve been talking about it since we first met, but circumstances have prevented me from getting one until just last week. The story of that tragedy is one for another post, but the main thing is that Heather has been hearing about them for as long as I have been telling her ballpark stories. Today we walked around to the third-base side – an unconscionable distance, given that there used to be a Carvery right around the corner from my seats – and ordered two brisket sandwiches. Charlie, my brisket guy (and it is a tick in the boxes enumerating my dreams that I can say something like ‘Charlie, my brisket guy’), remembers me, although we have not seen each other in three and a half years, and he knows exactly how to make my brisket sandwich: no pickle, no horseradish, and drenched in au jus. Heather takes hers with all the trimmings, and we hike back to the arcade. It is a matter of no small anxiety for me that she should enjoy it. I feel like I’ve been talking it up as the ne plus ultra of ballpark food, and while I do love it and believe it is delicious, it is also true that it is really the ne plus ultra of ballpark food for a not-very-sophisticated eater who likes his food salty and meaty; other people, including Heather, have much more discerning palates than I do, so I had this moment of panic where I thought maybe she would take a few bites and hate it and reassess our entire relationship: if his judgment is this bad on brisket, what else is he wrong about? She said she loved it, though, and Heather is not the kind of person to hold back on an opinion like that.

In the middle of the game, which started off looking good for the Giants but does not end up that way, we start talking about double plays and the position numbers that make up the 6-4-3 combo, and then an inning later, the Dodgers turn a big one; we have to have a conversation about whether we brought it on by talking about double plays, whether we threw a jinx there, which leads to thinking about Heather possibly being bad luck. I’m not the kind of person to put that on someone – I think it’s way more likely that it’s all the Dodger fans in the stadium – but it does occur to me that the one set of people present for all the Giants losses is the Giants themselves, who show up for every game. Clearly, the bad luck is not on us.

In the late stages of the game, Heather suffers increasingly from a freezing undercarriage, for which I have no immediate remedy. I offer to get a half-dozen hot dogs for her to sit on, but she feels like that’s not an ideal solution. Instead, she sits on the Hufflepuff scarf I got for her at last year’s Harry Potter VIP night. That seems to take the edge off, and we get through the ret of a 10-5 loss with minimal discomfort aside from the pain of watching Clayton Kershaw win another game. It’s a little upsetting that five runs was the winning number for the Giants yesterday but isn’t even close to enough tonight, but you get used to these little disappointments.

Fortunately, even though the Giants can’t pull it out, I got a good brisket sandwich and another lovely evening with a friend.

• 1 October: Farewells and Almosts
• 30 September: For the Love of God, Max Muncy
• 29 September: Flower Mary Child Lavender Blossom
• 27 September: Junk Time
• 26 September: Mathematically