Portland Grants A Wish

Golf Clap, Portland

Today in Portland, an MLB soccer team did a solid for the Make A Wish Foundation, giving 8-year-old Atticus Lane-Dupre getting the chance to play against his favorite team. That's awesome, of course, and the Make A Wish people might be your single best reason to think well of humanity this week. But I wanted to go one step further, and put the spotlight where it belongs -- on the crowd.

Something like four to five thousand people skipped out on their lunch hour, made it over to the stadium, and cheered their blessed heads off for Lane-Dupre and his teammates. Look at the looks on the faces of these kids, all of them; it's not just being in a big pitch, or playing against players they may look up to. It's the presence of a big crowd, acting just like an ordinary game or better, that puts this over the top into unforgettable.

The Make A Wish people have done similarly great stuff in the past -- I'm a huge fan of the superhero story from Seattle three years ago, where 350 people and the city really went way over the top -- and will continue to do so in the future. But nothing beats thousands of people going in for the chance to make the dream this wildly real. Portland gets rapped for twee hipsters and overly earnest granola people, but if this is what a community filled with those folks does, bring it on. They rule.