As the aftershocks of Tuesday night's historic election finally settle, I thought I'd relay just a few thoughts about how the election of Barack Obama as our next president plays in my world, one that is so involved in sports.

Even though I am a reporter who is obligated to maintain an ethical responsibility to objectivity, I feel I can write this because I don't cover politics and my personal political biases don't necessarily come into play when I question an athlete about this play or that play. (That's why I don't discuss distributing the wealth or 60s radicals with most professional athletes).

One of the many I spoke to Election Night was my longtime acquaintance, Ted Simmons, the man who I jokingly refer to as the last standing Democrat in baseball.

Simmons and I had a running conversation, debate and discussion from early in spring training through the entire season about how the race by the Democrats would play out. He was a Hillary Clinton supporter from the start, not necessarily because he didn't like what he heard from Obama but because he thought Clinton was the way to keep the Republicans out of office for 8 years. In fact, when Obama won the nomination, Simmons was forced to reach deep down into his pocket and pay off a bet that I won. (For those who get all stiff about these things, I turned over my winnings to Brewers Charities).

Last Tuesday night, as Simmons spoke to me from his home in the suburbs of St. Louis and it was increasingly apparent that Obama had won, we were both filled with joy. It was not because our candidate - for the lack of a better description - had won, but that all our worse fears about the American electorate had been swept aside during one overwhelming day.

Actually, the hardest thing for Simmons on this night was admitting that I had called it right from the start. For that insight, I thank another athlete who is very close to me, my youngest child, Rebecca, who is a freshman and plays volleyball at Northern Michigan. Unlike her father, her first ever presidential ballot went for the winner. That's something I have not been able to say very often in the 36 years I've have had the vote.

It was more than 2 years ago, when Bec was still a junior in high school and before Obama had formally announced his candidacy, that she told me to keep an eye on this guy from Illinois. When she spoke of him. her eyes brightened with her own audacity of hope, a trait I tried to instill in her long before Obama was a household name. This man helped bring it out. For that, I am thankful. Now, it is my hope that she can maintain that outlook as she and the rest of her generation embark on a journey to cure the ills her father's generation has passed on to her's.

Finally, I talked with my mother that night, albeit a one-way conversation. She was the one who nurtured my love of baseball as she would regale me with stories about growing up in Brooklyn and falling in love with a team called the Dodgers. It was in 1947, at just about the age my daughter is now, that she watched Jackie Robinson break down a barrier that before had seemed unbreakable to become what he wanted the world to see him as, a man who plays baseball. Fifty-one years later, she would have seen Obama break another one of those supposedly unbreakable barriers to become a man who is going to be our next president.

Politically, my mother was a Bill Buckley conversative before the rest of the world knew what a Bill Buckley conservative was. I don't doubt for a moment that if she had been alive, she would have cast her ballot, with reservations, for John McCain (though I know the only thing she would have wanted Sarah Palin to win was the local PTA election).

Still, I know that she would have been moved by Obama, the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya. No matter how much she would have disagreed with him politically, every time she would have seen him, she would have seen in him her grandson and my nephew, Pierce, the son of a white man from suburban Long Island and a black woman from the island of St. Kitts. In Obama, she would have seen a man like her grandson who had grown up in two worlds and somehow managed to mesh the best of them and deliver a message that friend and foe alike can embrace.

She once told me for a column I wrote years ago that as Jackie Robinson faced the racism then imbedded in America's national pastime, Brooklyn arose in anger because Robinson was "our guy.'' I suspect she'd say the same right now about our next president.

I know I do. At this moment, there is nothing audacious about my hope. My hope is now my reality. I am proud to be an American, immensely proud.