It’s a hope I’ve had every year for the past few years, and I don’t know if my time will finally come this year. I want to go see LSU play baseball.

At one time, it was an annual event, usually tied in as a double-header with Baton Rouge’s St. Patrick Day’s parade, a bit of Mardi Gras in Lent. We’d make a family trip trip to Baton Rouge, my wife, daughter and I, stay at my in-laws, get up early and go to the parade (one of my wife’s aunts lived in the parade route), go home for lunch and I would leave to catch game at “The Box.”

I must admit one of the reasons I want to go this year is to see something I haven’t seen on the campus — the new Alex Box Stadium. The old “Box” was torn down several years ago, and will soon be replaced by student apartments.

I miss the old Box. It was an intimate setting where the fans were close to the action and there was this wonderful aroma of hot dogs, hamburgers and fries cooking under the stands. I’ve been to the Astrodome and both Atlanta Braves stadiums, and while they were both cathedrals to the game, they couldn’t match the atmosphere of the old Alex Box stadium on a Saturday afternoon.

And there was one more thing they couldn’t match the memory of a great experience I had in junior high school.

Back when baseball was a major sport and players like Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and Ernie Banks and Stan Musial were diamond gods, a bunch of us 12-year-olds would get together and play baseball on weekends during the spring at a practice field at LSU near the Box. Those of us who could, rode our bicycles to the campus. Others had their parents take them and drop them off.

It was on one of those occasions we had the experience of a lifetime. We were helping some of our friends look a pay phone at Alex Box, and there was this poorly closed gate. And boys being boys, we squeezed through and we were in heaven. There was this manicured field with a smooth infield and snow-white bases. And for about 20 minutes, we had the time of our lives before we decided not to press our luck any further and slipped out the way we entered.

That memory has stuck with me all these years, and it’s relived every time I go visit LSU or pass by the now vacant lot where the Box once stood. And I’m hoping this year, as I do every year, I’ll get to go visit the new Box and enjoy a game.

But it will never be the same, really, and it will not have the place a former old structure of wood and concrete has in my heart when I remember the brief thrill a certain 12-year-old boy and his friends once had.