Day 57: I think I can, I think I can...

I'm Adam Sell and I have two months left before I leave Boston. My challenge? Do something in the city every day. Have ideas for my adventure? Send me an email.

There was a time — tough as it may be to believe — that I was not interested in sports. Now, please, contain your surprise. It was so long ago I can scarcely remember it. But my parents remind me that although we were frequent visitors to the Sports Depot in Allston, I had no interest in the memorabilia on the walls, or in the games broadcast on the TVs. No, I was there specifically to get the window seats to watch the trains go by.

For years even after my family moved out of the city limits, I would ask to go back to the Sports Depot, just to chuckle and point as the commuter rail sped by, or the freight trains moved forward and back, collecting cars from the train yard nearby. I had a fascination with trains that nothing but the window in the old depot could satisfy.

And I still love it for that reason. While I talked my friends into going with me under the guise of watching the Red Sox/Yankees game, I totally just wanted to stare out the window and hope a bunch of engines would pull past. We didn't end up at one of my old coveted platform seats, but I did claim the seat at our table with the best view of the tracks. And to my evident glee, I was rewarded with several trains passing by at varying speeds — some I just wanted to watch, and some I chose to shoot.

I could probably wax poetic about the CSX and MBTA trains that fly by for another several paragraphs, but I ought to mention the good, inexpensive food they had there. Since I was a notably picky eater when I'd last visited the nostalgic halls of the Depot, I hadn't tried anything on their menu. The sandwich I ordered was excellent, and the baseball game I only fleetingly paid attention to made for a perfect storm of awesome. There were three different MLB games on, a tennis match, and the Revs game. There was not a spot in the restaurant from which you couldn't see, say, a dozen TVs.

Sometimes when you revisit nostalgic things, they don't look as cool anymore. And sometimes, they do.