The Dawg-berg Address by Lowell Blackman
Six days ago our coaches brought forth on this playing field a renewed team, conceived in teamwork and dedicated to the proposition that all Dawgs are equal to all other players.
Now we are engaged in a great softball competition, testing whether that team or any team so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure those anxious moments in the dugout, at the plate, on deck, on the playing field, and still read complex signals.
We are met on a great ball-field of that competition. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field - our bench and our dugout as indicated by our great Dawgs sign - as a rejuvenated place of hope and of confidence for those Dawgs who here once gave their hearts, their souls, their sore limbs, their stretched muscles, that this team might live and might be reborn in a new season as it is in Nature and in the renewal of the seasons that cometh in natural order according to Nature. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate--we can not consecrate--we can not hallow--this ball-field. The brave Dawgs, living and retired, barking and quiet, howling and hushed, who struggled here, who batted here, who ran here, who signaled here, who slid here, and who bunted here have consecrated it far beyond our poor power to add or detract or keep score of their deeds and misdeeds, cues and miscues, runs and hits, wild pitches and errors.
The softball world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, how we play here, how we hit here, or how we field here, but it can never forget what the brave Dawgs of past seasons and years have done here.
It is for us, a reborn, renewed Dawgs team, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished, hitless, scoreless, runless work which they who played here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us, the present players, to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored Dawgs we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the past full measures of devotion, of running, of stealing, of bunting, of hitting, of fielding, of catching, of throwing, of coaching, of shouting--that we here highly resolve that these Dawgs shall not have played in vain -- that this team, under the skies of Israel, shall have a new birth of accomplishment and achievement, of confidence and poise, of faith and conviction -- and that teamwork of the Dawgs, by the Dawgs, for the Dawgs, shall not perish from the ball-field.
 | | Lowell, you're special, dude |
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