Nicole Brodeur / Times staff columnist
Let's keep our eyes on the ball

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But you can't even fill the place when there's a game going on. Why try when there's nothing to celebrate but memories?

The 116-win season. The trips to the playoffs. How about when the networks asked that the train whistles be silenced during All-Star week, and we told those blow-dries where they could stick it?

We were the Mariners, a bright, shining team in a bright, shining ballpark, where everyone knew the players, picked the winning hydro and beamed at the box scores like they were an honor-roller's report card.

We had even started to forget that we paid $372 million of the ballpark's $517 million tab, while the Mariners kicked in just $45 million and paid $100 million in cost overruns.

Lose enough for long enough, though, and it all comes rushing back.

"There's always a chance of opening up that wound," Mariners spokeswoman Rebecca Hale told me yesterday.

A chance?

It's to the point where the Mariners ticket in your wallet feels like a parking ticket.

Where the name "Boonie" sounds like a once-favorite restaurant where you suddenly got food poisoning.

Where my kid has defected to the National League and is sporting a Phillies T-shirt, the $18.95 Mariner plush bears at Starbucks have been marked down to $9.99 and where the long riffs my father and I shared about the M's sound like small talk at a funeral: quiet, awkward and mercifully short.
 
"It's a damn shame," he says.

"I don't know what happened," I say back.

Next subject.

The good memories have made it hard for us to handle this losing season, and be the kind of fans that are made at parks like Wrigley and Shea.

Those fans know how to keep showing up when the players don't seem to, and they know that long stretches of losses can make a simple base hit look like ballet.

All the more reason why today's Safeco anniversary, and the end of the All-Star break, can mean something if we let them: namely, the chance to turn what we remember into what we will see.

I'm told Mariners CEO Howard Lincoln is determined to get us back in World Series contention by 2005. ("He's serious," Hale told me.)

If that's true, then fans need to stay in the game, as well.

Some stats a little brighter than the box scores: Some 1.4 million fans have attended 41 games at Safeco this year, which is the fifth-best attendance in the American League. That's ahead of the A's, so there's hope.

I see the same in Bucky Jacobsen, an infielder for the Tacoma Rainiers who just won the Triple-A Home Run Derby.

Bring him up, Mr. Lincoln.

And, Howard, if you see a hootenanny outside Safeco today, back off: We own more of the place than you do.

Nicole Brodeur's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Reach her at 206-464-2334 or nbrodeur@seattletimes.com.

She still pines for Sweet Lou.