There was a point in my misspent youth–middle school and high school–when I was a sports fanatic in every sense of the word. This was unusual because I was an uncoordinated bookworm with asthma who never played a sport.

The mid 1980’s was a bittersweet time to be a Baltimore sports fan. 1983 brought the last Orioles World Championship but it also brought the loss of the Colts franchise. I followed the Orioles closely, listening to games on the radio when they weren’t televised and keeping score the old fashioned way. Any day that Storm Davis or Mike Boddicker pitched was a great day for me. However, never being a football fan, the Colts’ departure was a curiosity rather than a mortal wound.

In my world, 1983 meant the start of my obsession with Baltimore’s indoor soccer team, the Blast. And what an obsession it was! I’m still not sure how my parents put up with my constant yammering about soccer. Now, as a mother to an NFL crazy 14-year-old, I’m getting a little taste of my own medicine. The other day as we were driving to some friends’ house for the first Ravens game of the season, he wanted to talk about punt returns! I nearly set him on the side of road.

At the time, Baltimore had the luxury of three daily newspapers and a separate sports tabloid. Because my grandparents owned a news stand, I read all four sports pages every day. With the Blast though, I felt the need to clip and save every article printed about the team. I carefully organized and pasted them into scrapbooks that I still have today.

I dreamed of being involved in the business of professional sports, be it as a sports writer or public relations shirt in the front office. Over time, I realized that those jobs were few and far between so I needed more mainstream career aspirations. And I’ve spent nearly all my years since the 80’s working with the same company in various capacities. My love of sports waned and those days of true fanaticism were a distant memory.

But then we had two sons…and I nudged them to play soccer. They played in the fall in our local rec leagues, played indoors during the winter, and played some spring soccer. A few years ago, Connor moved up to travel soccer and it was a whole different game. This year, he went out for soccer as a freshman and made the varsity team at our small high school; at the same time, Jarrett, his younger brother, made his first travel soccer team. Right now, it’s all soccer, all the time, and we’re all into it.

And I’m reliving a bit of my childhood. I take photos of the boys and their friends playing sports and, now, I’m back to clipping newspaper articles and saving them in scrapbooks. For some strange reason, the whole thing leaves me on edge of tears and some times the tears win out. When Jarrett played his first travel game on Saturday, when Connor scored his first goal for his school yesterday, and, as I write this, the tears have won again.

I tell people…”I always wanted to be a sports photographer, I just didn’t know it would happen with my own kids as the athletes.”

Tears and all, it’s pretty cool to be me right now.