TILDEN, Neb. - Nearly 120 miles northwest of Lincoln, Nebraska's topography abandons its modest attempt at hill-making and yields to the flat inevitability of the prairie.
Along lonely Route 275, intersecting dirt roads are named incongruously - 88th Avenue, 555th Road, 284th Street - as if some optimistic planner once envisioned a great metropolis sprouting up in the farmland as easily as the corn and summer wheat.
It was just west of the Subs and Suds, not far off the two-lane highway, where on Thursday I finally encountered Tilden. For a lifelong Phillies fan like me, the bucolic town is a place where imagination and reality converge.