Opinion

Saying goodbye to Derek Jeter — and our youth

Derek Jeter’s farewell campaign comes with a particular pang for those of us who wanted to be him when we grew up — which, naturally, was a smidge harder if you happened to be a girl. I’ll get to that.

Ending with the retirement of the man who’s been the bedrock of your baseball-loving for 18 of your 27 years, it’s the season when your youth officially dies.

So, yes, this is a woman writing about Jeter — but not in the Katie Holmes I-wanted-to-marry-Tom-Cruise sorta way. Rather, it’s a woman who, for a good portion of her youth, wished she were a boy so she could play professional baseball.

That’s right, you heard me: Derek Jeter made me wish I’d been a boy.

Growing up in Wyoming, I was a Yankees fan because I always knew I would move to New York. And Jeter was the perfect player — classy, strong at the plate and in the field, a hustler and the kind of hero you wished abounded.

OK, yes: In wanting to be Jeter, I instead acted more like the He Who Shall Not Be Named third baseman. (At least I owned my behavior. . .) I puffed out my chest, so unlike Jeter himself, to ensure that those boys goshdarnit knew I could outrun them to first base. Something very much like Jeter — again, minus the in-your-face way I galloped there.

I also prided myself on my throwing ability. My grandfather, a former pitcher, taught me how to hold the ball for various pitches, so I was clearly a step above my male peers.

This could mean trouble, though. See, there was this one time I almost got kicked out of a 14-and-under girls softball game for arguing with the multi-color-bearded umpire for his inconsistent strike zone.

Another time, the entire press box I was in did get ejected from a summer collegiate-league game — the announcer, whose behavior I quite happily encouraged, was particularly mouthy to the female ump who had no concept of the space between the chest and knees and was also apparently blind to the straight corners of a clean, white plate.

Basically, you know, just me again engaging in the opposite sort of professionalism Jeter exhibits.

Still, who wouldn’t want to be him?

Eventually, I un-feminist-ly realized I wouldn’t be playing professional baseball with the bros, so I set my sights on sports medicine, to forever be in baseball’s company.

Until I realized science and math were not my friends — but words, yeah, they were.

This is where Saint Jeter comes in. Because you can bet your bottom dollar I read that book he wrote in 2001, “The Life You Imagine,” in which he chronicled his youthful goal to be exactly who he is and doing what he does: playing short for the Yanks. He influenced me again, to win the second life I’d imagined — the one that didn’t involve wearing a jockstrap.

Where Jeter moved the runner over, as it were, was that he was the perfectly pinstriped example of what hard work and sheer determination can accomplish.

And, perhaps more important, of how to achieve those things with such grace, with such enviable character, with such consistency and with such greatness.

Baseball mirrors life, it’s been said, and Jeter proved that both could be honorably played in the same way.

So suffice it to say, there will be crying in baseball when Jeter retires. If you think you hear a faint wailing coming from an apartment somewhere in Harlem, you are — it’s me, and it will last the whole season.

I’ll end by hijacking Walt Whitman’s poem on the death of Lincoln, with some small additions — partly to celebrate Jeet, but mostly to eulogize my soon-to-be-gone youth.

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful (wonderful) trip is (almost) done;

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:

But O heart! heart! heart!

O the bleeding drops of red

Where on the deck my Captain (my youth, really) lies,

Fallen cold and dead.