Just then, a great, guttural scream rings out. Everyone turns as Corey Matthews, standing at the end of the diving board, leaps up and gathers his lithe body into a tight ball. The guests, Mona, Stephen, Trey—they all watch as he soars through the air, as he quickly, perfectly, drops out of the blue-black sky. And then they all brace themselves for the loud splash of contact, for the spray of displaced water that will rise and spread outward in so many long, perfect arcs.

FIFTH

There were no glaciers in Arizona, save for the tips of a few tall peaks, ball caps you’d barely notice above the bulk of the rest of them. Nothing like the thick kind of ice that showed up in Washington: at one point the Mariners, the whole team, the stadium and the fans and all of Puget Sound, were under three thousand feet. Picture five Space Needles standing tip to toe, frozen into one big ice cube, and then imagine that kind of glacier suddenly sluicing. That’ll change your outlook for the game, your prospects for the weekend series.

But fourteen thousand years ago, North America’s glaciers began dissolving in earnest. When the half-mile-deep daub of cool vanilla cream melted from its perch on the Colorado Plateau, it sent water south by southwest, a great gusher that must’ve looked like the rush onto the field that happens when you give the rookie squad the green light to warm up.

These profound floods meant added vegetation in the region—ferns and bogs and big, leafy trees took root in Arizona—and all of a sudden the landscape was verdant. The land was covered in bushes with base-size waxy emerald leaves, was blanketed with soft-palmed ferns as big around as the pitching mound. That kind of green seems unlikely now, about as probable as a National League pitcher hitting an inside-the-park home run. But it happened, a brief spell of lush life that arrived with a big, splashing wall of water.

The Lions ride their own wall of water, and surge forward through the spring. The fielders who went butterfingered over the winter regain their touch; the bats, under Coach Mike’s grouchy supervision, grow as strong and thick as banyan trees. The pitchers find their arms, their heat and precision fed by the newly fertile soil that is a team coming together. And the team is aligning, starting to look like a cohesive unit, like a contender for the division—the bullish among us suggest the pennant.