I’m sitting in the lobby of this Midwestern hotel waiting for the next opportunity to go out again and see my new love. We were together just an hour ago but I can’t get enough. It’s long after midnight and soon, I will steal away into the night for another long glance at that beauty. Deem me sick if you want to, cynic, but it’s love. True love in the heartland.

Put away your scandal sheet, Tabloid Tony. It’s not as sinful as all that.

As I write, I sit across the street from Kauffman Stadium, home of the Kansas City Royals. After I’m done typing this self-absorbed column, I’ll step outside and climb a short hill so that I can stare down upon it some more. I’ll stand out there on the highway at the western edge of Missouri and stare all dreamy-like as big rigs whip past me and stray dogs pee on my legs.

I first slapped eyes upon Kauffman three days ago and I’ve been going out at all hours to take another look, to further verify its reality. I saw the Royals win there on Saturday and lose on Sunday, and yet I keep creeping back.

The hotel security man thinks I’m a spy.

You may wonder why a ball field in the middle of the countryside has so stricken me and why I declare this the best trip of summer. There are no hula dancers here, after all, and no hot tubs where borrowing someone else’s wife is completely acceptable.

Allow me to elucidate.

For me, the love and the agony began in 1977. My father was dead, Santa Claus turned out to be a big fat phony and I needed something to believe in.

My brother told me the way to salvation was through the New York Yankees, but I was skeptical. This was the same older brother who told me that Thurman Munson once hit a ball so hard it was still sailing across the globe four years later. The same older brother who promised he had not put disgusting shrimp parts in my bed when in fact, he had.

You can’t trust anything an older sibling tells you. And anyway, I was tired of cheering for the Yankees only because my father had and because my brothers, uncles and older cousins worshipped the pinstripes, too.

Impressive is that first act of defiance from a 10-year-old boy who, mustering up all of his courage and the best of his vocabulary, stands tall to announce that the Yankees suck.

And so it began. I was beaten for a half hour and when I staggered to my feet again, red and bruised from noogies and Indian sunburns, the defiance had not died. I would not cheer for the Yankees in the playoffs, I reaffirmed through fattened lips. I would, in fact, cheer for their opponents, the strange and exciting Kansas City Royals.

Those of you who know baseball know how this ends. The Royals took a lead into the final inning of the final game of the championship. The Yankees snuck back with some form of Bronx voodoo and won the damn thing after all. And again the next year and on it went.

Oh, the pain, much greater than eye-gouges and pink bellies. My induction into Royals fandom was one of trauma, and how fitting is that? The agony has been there now for three decades.

Another boy might have given up and turned his ardor to another sport, such as competitive Big Wheel racing. But I was steeled against disappointment because I had suffered it before and I had endured. In the unformed way of a child, I understood that a person who gives up on a team during bleak times will also turn his back on a sick friend, an old dog or a girlfriend with a pimple on her nose.

Loyalty is a fine thing but seldom easy. Every year, I embrace the Royals more closely because they hearken back to a time when I needed something to restore my faith. Every year, they break my heart. I’m like an abused wife who, bleeding and spiritually drained, will insist that they love me back, and that someday, they will change.

Somebody hand me my KC hankie. I’m getting misty.

For three decades, I’ve remained loyal to the Kansas City Royals, which is something akin to cheering for the worm during a fishing trip.

I love them and yet the only proof I’ve had that they are anything more than a mirage are the digital images that come through my television. That, and the daily scorn and wit of the hulking sportswriter Randy Whitehouse, who takes entire weeks off each spring to make up clever jokes about my team.

My childhood was redefined by the goings-on in a ball field halfway across the country. That same game in that same park was at later times the only consistent thing in a strange and often deranged adulthood. Kauffman Stadium and the game it embraced had come to serve as the very representation of loyalty and perseverance, and yet I had never seen it.

Now I have. I’ve seen it so many times, the good people of Kansas City are starting to talk. And all those noogies, pink bellies and losing seasons have lost some of their sting. Can you blame me for wanting to go out there one more time and brave traffic for another glimpse? It’s love, I tell you. True-blue love.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. You can e-mail him at [email protected].