PLATTEVILLE, May 6 — Two area high school baseball teams played a nonconference game at the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa, Thursday.

That was not the Major League Baseball-capable stadium under construction on the property. That was the very field depicted in the movie.

The wind was brisk enough that no balls were hit into the corn, which wasn’t there anyway since there is no corn yet in late April. No VW Microbuses were parked in the parking lot (I did meet two people from Texas and two from South Carolina), no rookie player walked off the field to become an elderly doctor, and no sniveling brother-in-law of the guy who built the field wandered across while players were warming up. But the house is there, and you still have to take a zigzag course of town roads to get to the site.

“Field of Dreams” is sort of a tribute to the ’60s from the perspective of the current-day setting in the conformist, materialistic late ’80s. But not for everyone — author Terence Mann, played by James Earl Jones, basically disowns his own work when he hears about how it divided the ball diamond builder and his father. (Mann tries to ward off his unwelcome visitor by saying “Oh my god! You’re from the ’60s!” before he throws him out.) How that divide is magically bridged is why “Field of Dreams” gets a lot of airtime on Father’s Day weekend.

There is a Darlington/Platteville connection besides anyone who may have participated in the last scene of cars getting to the ballpark. Mary McDonald Gershon had two screen credits in her acting career, one consisting of two words — “It’s sick!” — during the movie’s PTA meeting scene over banning J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. (Read for yourself at https://www.swnews4u.com/local/25-years-after-its-sick/.)

Elsewhere in this week’s edition of your favorite weekly newspaper is Tammy Kilby’s personal reflection on being a middle school kid in 1986, a year that, for those drawn to tragedy, included the space shuttle Challenger explosion, which killed seven astronauts, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which killed (officially) 30 plant operators and firefighters. (Given the commitment of the Soviet Union to the truth, the actual death toll, depending on how you count it, could have been much, much higher. That might make you wonder why people hold protests against a party whose name starts with R on a day created by the ideology that killed 100 million people.)

I was a UW–Madison student (and more importantly member of the UW Band) in 1986, which places me on the old end of Generation X. Unlike others I knew, who had either more disposable income or more willingness to spend it, I did not own parachute pants, a Members Only jacket (though I had a copycat of the latter) or any clothing that might be found on a TV series Tammy didn’t mention, “Miami Vice.” I did own a leather jacket that was “cordovan,” dark red, sort of matching my car.

The only movie from Tammy’s list that I saw in a theater was “Crocodile Dundee,” though the others except for “Pretty in Pink” I did see because we had a videocassette recorder, and Woodman’s on the east side of Madison rented videos for $2. (“Be Kind, Rewind.”) For someone who arguably grew up in front of a TV set (I have probably forgotten more ’70s TV I watched than most people actually watched) I don’t remember much TV watching at night because by then I was usually either covering a game for the weekly newspaper I worked for, or playing at a Badger game. (Off Tammy’s list the only TV show I did watch was “L.A. Law.”)

I’ve written here before that if you run into someone who grew up in the ’80s and speaks in sarcastic snark (as if), that is the fault of NBC’s “Late Night with David Letterman.” (As opposed to the tamer CBS version.) Some others talk like that: The children of those who grew up in the ’80s. They don’t have the excuse we had, which is that the optimism of the ’60s morphed into the individualism of the ’70s, which proved Sir Isaac Newton right with the opposite ’80s.

The funny part about all that is that I went from not being able to fit in (or so it seemed) to not caring if I fit in, though I was never accused of being a nonconformist. In a 2,000-student high school I belonged to exactly two groups — the band and, in the last two years, the newspaper. (I was accused of dressing preppy, for what it’s worth. I did have one dark blue Izod shirt and kept borrowing my dad’s dark red Izod shirt) There is a very small list of things I did because everybody else was doing them, though there is a larger list of things I did because everybody my age was supposed to do them. (For instance, going right to college after graduating — what is this “gap year” thing? — and getting a job, and in my case having a job lined up before I graduated from UW.) It turns out that the not-fitting-in part is a pretty universal feeling if you ask from the perspective of a couple decades or more later.