Motivation Quote by Mark McGwire

McGwire’s line has the breathless, half-innocent awe of someone standing inside a media cyclone and trying to name the weather. “A great thing” sounds almost childlike, but it’s also strategic: it lets him celebrate without claiming ownership, praise the moment without detailing the machinery behind it. In 1998, baseball desperately needed a new story after the 1994 strike alienated fans. The home run chase wasn’t just a sports event; it was an industrial-strength redemption arc. McGwire’s phrasing gives the public permission to feel wonder again.

The real work happens in the second sentence: “We don’t know if it will ever happen again.” It sells scarcity. It turns a streak into history while it’s still unfolding, flattening doubts and complications under the romance of the once-in-a-lifetime. That uncertainty is part prophecy, part marketing, part self-protection. If the moment is “unrepeatable,” then questioning the conditions that produced it feels like spoiling the magic.

There’s subtext in the communal “we,” too. It quietly recruits everyone - fans, reporters, MLB executives - into a shared investment in the spectacle. In hindsight, the line reads like an accidental epitaph for an era later reinterpreted through performance-enhancing drugs and institutional winks. Even then, the insistence on singularity hints at anxiety: when something feels too big, too fast, too perfect, the suspicion isn’t that it might repeat, but that it might not hold.