The Oakland A’s are leaving. What I’ll carry with me after 4 decades as a fan

I took my sons to their final Oakland A's game on Friday night. It was also my last game as a fan and not a journalist. It was a beautiful September evening with a lively crowd, lots of drumming, great pitching, some late-inning drama and — gasp! — even the return of The Wave. It had everything we could have wanted except for an A's win and the promise we'd get 'em again next season.

This time next week, the Oakland A's will be no more. A stat posted earlier this month by A's baseball information manager Mike Selleck that listed the career leaders in games played at the Oakland Coliseum went a long way toward explaining why. The star-studded list included Rickey Henderson, Reggie Jackson and Mark McGwire, among others. But what stood out from that list wasn't those names, but that exactly one out of the 10 (Eric Chavez) had debuted after 1990. And no player on the list had been on an A's roster since 2010.

What wasn't listed, of course, were all the players who could have been on that list — Jason Giambi, Miguel Tejada, Marcus Semien , Matt Olson , Matt Chapman , Josh Donaldson, to name a few. Stars who broke into the big leagues with the A's who could have been cornerstones of the franchise but were either allowed to leave via free agency without a competitive offer or traded well before their walk years.

Any one of those players could have been a face of the franchise, someone to build the team's branding around, much the way the San Francisco Giants did with Buster Posey across the Bay. But none of them were signed, and with the exception of Giambi, no one was surprised they weren't. The A's — who play in a top-10 media market nationally — haven't been higher than 20th in team payroll since 2007, when they ranked 17th. According to MLB Trade Rumors extension tracker , they have signed eight players to extensions since the 2008 season. All of them were traded or released before the contracts were completed.

It is difficult to build a fan base when you don't have anything solid to sell, and yet, remarkably, A's fans still poured their hearts into the team, year after year. For years, stars left and banners were raised and chants were invented for the next player to take their place. Rinse and repeat. It wore down the attendance numbers, certainly, especially when as the payrolls got smaller and the rosters less talented, the ticket prices somehow got more expensive.

And yet, on Friday as I and so many others stopped to look at the A's history walls on the ramps that connect the upper and lower concourses and to take photos in every conceivable spot in the stadium, you could see how much everyone just wanted them to 'stAy' , warts and all. It's been 30 years since Oakland A's fans were treated respectfully, but none of them appeared ready to say goodbye. I certainly wasn't.

I'm the first to admit that I owe the Oakland A's a lot. If the team hadn't been so fun and so dynamic in the 1980s, I might have devoted myself to football or basketball or a normal passion like, I don't know, baking. Instead, I fell in love with baseball. Thanks to the education I received from Bill King, Lon Simmons and Ray Fosse (and later Ken Korach and Vince Cotroneo), the game made sense to me like little else in life ever has.

I never intended to make covering baseball a career, but when blogging became a thing, my late husband suggested I start writing one about the A's, probably so he didn't have to listen to me drone on and on about them. The joke was on him, as I still never shut up about the A's and I dragged him into the fan base along with me.

That blog turned into an opportunity to start a website about the A's, which I called OaklandClubhouse. The Oakland part of Oakland A's always meant the most to me. That little website somehow remarkably went from a passion project to a full-time career and never would have gone anywhere if so many coaches, executives and players from the A's hadn't been willing to talk to me. I'll always be grateful for that.

But more than the opportunity to cover baseball, writing for OaklandClubhouse brought me closer to other Oakland A's fans than I likely ever would have gotten otherwise. Whether it was through the message boards on that site or at various stadiums where I was covering the team and its minor-league affiliates, I got to know the most passionate members of the fan base. And in getting to know them, I got to understand more about myself and why it was that this little team with funky colors and white cleats was so important to me.

There is a saying, "Oakland against the world," that speaks to what it has meant to be an Oakland A's fan. The A's were the second MLB team to come to the Bay Area and they've been treated like a second-favorite child in the region ever since. And yet, that was part of the charm. It's easy to root for the team that everyone else loved. Picking that underdog was a challenge. As a kid growing up just over the East Bay hills in Orindait gave me a sense of purpose and community. That became even more a part of the ethos of the fan base after the Haas family sold the team in 1995 and A's ownership switched from being community partners to community adversaries.

There is freedom in rooting for the thing that everyone else overlooks. You get to own it more, to shape it to what you want it to be. A's fans were unique because they could be. There were no expectations for what their fandom should look like, and that freedom birthed creativity not seen in many other places in American sports. There were drums and banners and fan-designed T-shirts and murals and puppets and huge, oversized forearms to bash and YouTube videos about ghost riding a Volvo. There were parties in the parking lot and on the BART ramp.

Fans could be themselves at the Coliseum, and that always struck a chord with me. We are asked in our lives to fill so many spaces in the way that others expect us to fill them. At the Coliseum, the spaces were wide open and could be filled in any way you could imagine. I like to think that spirit even rubbed off on the players. It hasn't been uncommon over the years to see players find their best selves in an Oakland A's uniform. I believe it's easier to be at your best when you can be you.

The Coliseum matched the fan base in many ways. It was often neglected but it still showed up looking beautiful where it counted, with the best playing surface in baseball and great views of the field around the stadium. It wasn't fancy, but it didn't have to be. It was just baseball.

Oakland A's fans under the age of 50 never got a World Series parade. There was a World Series win, of course, but the celebration was muted in the wake of the Loma Prieta earthquake. It seemed inconceivable in 1989 that we wouldn't ever get that parade, but while the A's never went too long in between postseason runs, they never made it back to that victory podium.

But on an unseasonably warm February day earlier this year, I got a chance to experience what an Oakland A's World Series parade would have felt like. "Fans' Fest," organized by the Oakland 68s and the Last Dive Bar, brought more than 15,000 fans together to celebrate their team and its history. There was so much joy and unity that day. That community was what the Oakland A's were always about. When I tick through my memories of the A's — birthdays celebrated at the Coliseum, walk-off wins, legendary performances, family milestones, and, of course, heart-breaking losses — that event at Jack London Square will top the list.

I always harbored this fantasy of growing old at A's games in Oakland, eventually retiring and becoming that white-haired lady in the stands with a hat full of pins and a season-long scorecard pad. I dreamed of introducing my grandkids to the game that I loved through the way that I learned to love it. I'm so sad that will never happen. I guess I'll have to take up baking after all.

I am grateful, though, to have had the experience. In Judaism, we have a saying when a loved one passes: "May their memory be a blessing." It's difficult to bask in good memories amid the pain of loss, but as much as this departure hurts now, I do feel blessed for having had the opportunity to experience it.

Since I can't bring my grandkids to Oakland A's games, I leave for them (and anyone else still reading this) a list of all the important things I learned in four-plus decades of being obsessed with the Oakland A's. Please add yours to the comments.