What's the best way to spend a summer evening?

For many of us, it's playing softball with friends, under the lights, a cooler of beer in the dugout. In the late 1980s, author Rich Cohen, then a senior in high school, assembled a team of ne'er-do-wells - gear heads, burnouts, goof balls, and the possibly gifted - to compete in what Cohen considered the best 12-Inch softball league in the Lower 48. Think Field of Dreams, but, instead of a cornfield in Iowa, these games were played behind a grade school in Glencoe, Illinois, on Chicago's North Shore.

Cohen named the team The North Shore Screen Doors, hence the fight song, "Screen Door Slam", inspired by 1985's "Super Bowl Shuffle". ("We ain't out there just to get a tan / we're out there doing the Screen Door Slam.") The Screen Doors played just two seasons. The first was glory, but the second, by which time the kids had begun to grow apart, was an error-filled mess, which is why, in late July, Cohen called on his father, famed negotiator Herb Cohen ("Herbie") to fix the team. A titanic struggle followed, as Herbie, using all his grown-up shrewdness, negotiating prowess, and sports knowledge, wrested control and remade the team in time for a pennant run. Along the way, several timeless questions come up: What's more important, fun or winning? Family or friends? Speed or power?

This is a story of perfect seasons, friends, games that only seem important, and how a long summer night ends in the cool dawn of adulthood. In it, Cohen has attempted to create a new genre of sports journalism ("Cosmic Little League") and also add to his greater project of doing for Chicago's North Shore what Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County and Springsteen did for Asbury Park. It's got softball, fields where the dirt blows, heroes and villains, trickery and negotiation, fathers and sons, and characters, each of whom could anchor his own John Hughes movie. This is The Bad News Bears had those punks reconvened for one more run at the title.