The Professor turned back the clock and it was fun to watch

In a season going nowhere, it was a reminder that cool stuff can still happen

In the movie “For The Love of The Game” Vin Scully waxes poetic before Kevin Costner’s character, Billy Chapel, attempts to finish off a perfect game against the Yankees. “You get the feeling that Billy Chapel isn’t pitching against left handers, he isn’t pitching against pinch hitters, he isn’t pitching against the Yankees. He’s pitching against time. He’s pitching against the future, against age, and even when you think about his career, against ending. And tonight I think he might be able to use that aching old arm one more time to push the sun back up in the sky and give us one more day of summer.”

That final line kept rattling around in my cabeza as our old pal Kyle Hendricks was befuddling the San Francisco Giants on Saturday night with nary a single pitch reaching 90 miles an hour.

Kyle’s really not that old. Even for a big leaguer. He’s only 33. But he missed the second half of last season and the first couple months of this one with a shoulder injury, and we have no idea how many more innings (he’s thrown 1,336 in his career) he’s got left or how many more batters he’ll face (5,467 so far).

Maybe it will be a lot. Maybe it won’t. And so, watching him survive a barrage of balls hit right at guys to start the game and then settle in and start eliciting a bunch of soft contact, you couldn’t help but wonder if he was about to give us one more—maybe one last—moment to remember.