Aging & Wisdom Quote by John Thorn

Nostalgia has a cruel geometry: it enlarges the past while insisting the viewer hasn’t changed. John Thorn, baseball’s most eloquent historian, pins that illusion to a single, devastating contrast. The line opens with a simple fact - heroes age - then pivots to Dylan Thomas’s “boys of summer,” a phrase already stained with elegy. By borrowing Thomas’s “in their ruin,” Thorn drags sports memory out of highlight-reel amber and into the honest light of decay. The subtext isn’t just that athletes decline; it’s that our relationship to them is built to deny decline until it becomes unavoidable.

The kicker is “yet we seem the same.” Thorn isn’t describing vanity so much as a cultural trick: we treat our childhood idols as fixed points, and by keeping them fixed, we get to imagine our own youth as permanent. Sports fandom becomes a time machine with season tickets. When the “heroes” grow old on camera, the spell breaks, exposing the real anxiety underneath: if they can’t stay young, neither can we.

Context matters here because Thorn writes as a custodian of continuity. A historian’s job is to mark change; his lament is that fandom fights it. The Thomas reference signals literary seriousness, but it’s also strategic shorthand: one borrowed line carries mourning, beauty, and inevitability. Thorn’s intent is to make the reader feel the snap of recognition - the moment you realize the ruin isn’t only theirs.