"Ah, man," the kid said. "A great day.
"One of the best days of my life."
He said this before the game, before the ovations and the wall-banging drive. He said this because his parents were rushing up from Georgia to be there, because his girlfriend was with him, because everything he worked for, everything he imagined over the course of a dream that started when he was 7 years old was about to play out in front of him.
It's the stuffing of baseball, these stories. It's what makes it as much of a cult as it is a sport. Did The Babe really call his shot? Could Ted Williams really read the lettering on the baseball?
Was that blood on Curt Schilling's sock, or Heinz?
Brown arrived in the clubhouse about 4 p.m., dressing at an unmarked locker between those of Greg Dobbs and Raul Ibanez, within a wisecrack of the ones used by Chase Utley and Ryan Howard, with whom he is close.
Howard was him once, had the big call-up, went down, came back up, won rookie of the year.
He's offering advice. Brown, who says Howard "was like my big brother," is absorbing.
"I tell him not to worry about it," Howard said. "All it is, is just going out there and fulfilling your expectations of yourself. And just doing your thing and not worrying about anything else.
"I remember I got my first hit, a pinch-hit, against Jaret Wright. And I remember I was in the on-deck circle and I was kind of nervous.
"But then when they announced my name and I heard the crowd kind of erupt - that's when I was like, 'All right, I'm here.' "
