Back, and forth.

I was 12 years old and the Rangers were a perennial disappointment.

Ever since I understood the point of the pro baseball season, the Rangers regularly dashed hopes, especially those of a kid whose team put just as many ballplayers on trading cards as any other team but whose team almost never played on TV and absolutely never played past 162.

Managers, if they were good ones, lasted two years, maybe three.

All-Star reps got one at-bat, or one inning.

The Rangers were bad in 1981, a season that was put on hold for two (summer vacation) months. The only way to see them play more than four or five times a month was to buy a ticket. Their best players were in their 30s. My Baseball America would arrive in the mailbox with three-week-old prospect stats and stories that I couldn’t wait to tear into (Tommy Dunbar! Walt Terrell!!) and pore over until the newsprint typeset began to fade.

And I loved the team, and the game.

There was no Twitter and no sports talk on the radio and no games on TV, even locally, roughly six days out of the week.

Much of the game was left to a 12-year-old’s imagination, acted out in daily streetball marathons and dreamed up while lost in rows and columns of numbers on Topps’s gray-green and gray-red backs (and the whites of those new issues from Donruss and Fleer) and celebrated while listening to Mel Proctor and Bill Merrill and Eric Nadel narrate the action.

I always hoped for post-season, national-stage baseball but almost never really expected it.

Still, I loved the game.

I drove my 12-year-old son and his buddy down to Austin this past Saturday for a college football game. Max was 18 months old when the Longhorns won their last national championship, and though they’d had a few good teams after that, even those seasons would regularly end in disappointment, and by time he was old enough to pay close attention, they weren’t all that good.

On Saturday we watched Shane Buechele, and a new helping of hope. New for Max, for sure.

Maybe Dak and Zeke are going to provide that, too.

(Which is my somewhat healthier football mindset this morning, after getting recalibrated by Brad Sham’s appropriate tweet last night to the angry masses, of which I was part: “Honest to gosh, you perfect people who act like every loss by a team is a personal affront to you, get a grip. An average team lost. Move on.” Salute, Twitter.)

I remember telling seven-year-old Max in 2011 that baseball seasons don’t always end with the World Series coming to town — that his first two of those were my first two as well — and though Erica, at age 16, is experiencing her first Presidential campaign at this level of awareness, they’re not always like this, either. (Also a first for Mom and Dad.)

Sports is hope, sometimes offered in the form of a baseball team headed towards 162+ for the sixth time in seven years, other times by a promising young quarterback taking his first college or pro snaps, other times by a couple packs of 1981 baseball cards and a nightly appointment with a transistor radio locked on 820 AM.

My kid and I were in the building, and the Longhorns won, a game that went the way it should — but more important than the 41-7 final was the 18-year-old’s poise and play, and the hope that goes with it.

Fair to say, I suppose, that, in a similar sense, what Dak Prescott did yesterday offers more positives that the negatives provided by 19-20.

At Shane Buechele’s age, his dad was hitting .233 in 90 freshman at-bats for the Stanford Cardinal.

The year after that, he got only a third as much action. That was 1981, and he wasn’t mentioned in any of the Baseball America issues that landed in my family’s physical mailbox three weeks after the type had been set.

The year after that, Steve Buechele hit .354/.465/.530 as a junior and was taken in the fifth round by the Texas Rangers. That he had a big league career distinguishes him from all of the club’s 40 picks that year aside from 39th-rounder Kenny Rogers.

Steve has won as many championships as Shane. In fact, he’s never been to a World Series, as a player or as a coach.

This year, there’s hope. Texas leads the division by 9.5 games, has a one-game edge for home field all the way through the post-season, and, this weekend, after a shaky run through the rotation, Yu Darvish and Cole Hamels and a returning Colby Lewis went a combined 18 innings (14 hits and seven walks, with 20 strikeouts) in Anaheim and allowed six runs (3.00 ERA), giving us a glimpse of what may very well be the Rangers’ one through three in the playoffs.

There’s an added dose of hope there, too, and the fact that 37-year-old Adrian Beltre (closer in age to Steve than to Shane) drove in runs in all three games as Texas won the Angels series is just as energizing as the fact that six of the offense’s other seven RBI over the weekend belonged to players Jon Daniels acquired in August.

Today’s the 22nd anniversary of my first day as a lawyer, and maybe that’s got me a little overly nostalgic this morning.

Maybe it’s the fact that Steve Buechele’s kid is now leading one of my teams.

Or that my son and I were on hand a couple nights ago to watch him do work.

My baseball team gives me reason these days, unlike my days as a 12-year-old, to think in mid-September about 162+ and about playoff rotations and about the idea of Adrian Beltre and Carlos Beltran and Carlos Gomez and Michael Young and Steve Buechele winning their first World Series, and ours, too.

It may be true that this type of baseball hope is something my kid has legitimately held just as often as his dad has, but there’s no sense in looking back and bemoaning how long the emotional investment, not yet fully rewarded in the competitive sense, has lasted. It’s all good.

It’s all good.

Three in Houston, starting tonight — half of the club’s six remaining road games (while there are 12 home games in that span, and then two more Home Games to start the schedule that comes after that).

12.5, 10.5, 8.5, or 6.5.

As we are now accustomed, and privileged, to do, we now look forward, and it’s the kind of adrenaline that makes me feel 12 again.

As I sit here wondering how different 1981 would have felt if I’d been allowed to experience this kind of perennial baseball success back then, I’m also thinking about how different 2016 would feel in that case, too. This is still new, more so in a way for me than it is for Max, and I can’t wait for tonight’s game and these next few weeks and these next couple months to help the way I feel about this team, and this game, evolve into something new, and hopefully into something uniquely great.