It is buried deep in the basement closet of my parents' house, beneath shoulder pads, muddied cleats my brothers and I have outgrown, crumpled baseball caps, out-of-print biology, trigonometry and philosophy textbooks from high school and college -- my first lacrosse stick.

Shaped from hickory, it is now misshapen by neglect. Every part of the stick is flawed -- its leather pocket dry-rotted, stiff as the strings of a tennis racket, its gut sidewall curled outward, its shaft warped, unbalanced when I cradle it in my hands. It is virtually impossible to play with, yet I cannot throw it away.

The last time I used it in a game was in 1973, when I was in third grade. I played in the St. Mark's Instructional League. It was my second year of lacrosse. This was during the time when the game was in the midst of a transition into the modern era of synthetic sticks and helmets which made the game more graceful, perfect.

Most of the equipment we used was donated and seems antique now. Plastic helmets were usually snatched up by the older kids, so many of us were stuck wearing weather-beaten leather helmets painted white with saddle shoe polish and fitted with bent face masks that looked like they had been constructed from wire coat hangers. Our uniforms were colored cotton T-shirts without numbers. Since lacrosse equipment was scarce in sporting goods stores, most of us wore hockey gloves, which were stiff and difficult to move our hands in. And the sticks, with the exception of a few scattered trendsetters in the league who used the early model STX, were made of wood, the kind that only the women players have continued to use.

I laugh when I think back about that equipment. There is something comic about it. There is something funny about the wooden sticks and the old lacrosse manuals that resembled some kind of charm school dance instruction. I laugh about it the way former '70s hipsters do when they reminisce about bell-bottoms and platform shoes. "Can you believe we really wore that stuff?" I laugh about the old equipment the way people now laugh at old inventions they might see in the Smithsonian: iceboxes, crank-start automobiles, phonographs, rotary telephones, eight tracks. I laugh at the slapstick comedy of invention and evolution. I laugh because that's what lacrosse used to be all about when I was a kid -- comedy.

Lacrosse then meant praying for an early spring in March when practices began, and at the end of practice welcoming the stifling heat from the car heater that thawed my hands frozen inside my gloves. Lacrosse then meant surviving the boredom of drill lines sprawled throughout the fields of Catonsville High School, the regiments of kids clad in baggy sweats, jeans, cleats, as we practiced roll dodges, face dodges, over-the-shoulder passes and scooping ground balls.

Lacrosse then meant going into the back yard with my father and brother to sharpen our throwing and catching skills. Those old sticks were difficult to learn with, heavy, cumbersome. Breaking a pocket into one took patience, something I had little of as a child. My stick resembled a snowshoe, and I might as well have been using one. Many evenings were spent in tearful frustration. We used to keep track of the number of catches we were able to make, 10 being a number beyond us. Much of the time was spent chasing the ball down in the azaleas, cheating by placing it in the stick with my hand, and then lobbing the ball back to my father in a high arching throw.

Games meant chaos, packs of kids raking and whacking at a loose ball hidden in the maze of cleats. Occasionally one of the older kids would break free with the ball and put it in the goal a few times to decide a game. But for the most part many of us spent the games trying to look like lacrosse players, trying to keep the helmets from sliding over our eyes, making sure our gloves didn't fall off, making sure we held onto our sticks, making sure we ran around a lot.

Lacrosse then meant playing for teams sponsored by local clubs of charity and good deed that lent a humbleness to the game -- the Optimists, the Knights of Columbus, the Lions, the Rotary. They began to buy us new uniforms, ones with numbers. I can remember the pungent odor of stale sweat mixed with mud and lime that filled the equipment room as we picked up our helmets and jerseys, and the indecision brought on by superstition when choosing a number. Six or seven. Nineteen or 20. Never 13.

The third year I played my father bought me a 73 fiber- glass STX with nylon mesh netting. My wooden stick was immediately abandoned to the garage. I told him that I needed this stick to compete in the older league. I also needed the new stick because all of the other kids were beginning to use them.

With each successive year I played, the competition became stiffer and more equipment was necessary. Arm pads in Midget League. Shoulder pads in Juniors. A cup in high school. At the same time, manufacturers were constantly "upgrading" the designs of the sticks that seem to mysteriously break during cold weather. I broke a stick nearly every other year, and was usually glad I had because it meant getting a new one, one that was state-of-the-art, one that might give me a competitive edge, one that might make me fit in. Replacing equipment became part of the game because lacrosse, after all, unlike its Indian predecessor, is about money, a game of the wealthy.

With the accumulation of equipment, I began to take the game more seriously. Mornings spent watching my father and the other fathers stringing nets onto the goals or lining the fields as the dew burned off were replaced by traveling team tryouts, surviving cuts, and road games. The teams I played for competed with teams throughout Maryland for state championships.

Neighborhood rivalries began to appear. The games began to turn into class struggles in my mind, and the coaches knew this and made the most of it when we played teams from North Baltimore. They gave us pep talks on how the kids from Towson and Cockeysville looked down upon us, how they thought of us as hillbillies, hicks, the team from Cretinsville.

The one victory that I still cherish was when I was 14 and played for the Juniors against a team from the Towsontowne program. They arrived to show us up, wearing the most expensive uniforms we had ever seen -- tricolor helmets, jerseys with their names and nicknames printed across the back: Snake, Chick, Hollywood. The game was ugly, full of fights, and afterward one of our coaches gloated, "Fellas, this is what it's all about."

And I believed it.

The problem was that I believed it too much.

In high school I began to take the game too seriously. The only games I cared about were the ones we played against the teams from the elite MSA A Conference, who handed us our heads every game. How I hated them. I was sure that by beating them on the field they would somehow respect us, who we were and where we came from. Yet at the same time I held a double standard for the teams we played from the B Conference, which consisted mostly of players from the inner city who had little experience and played on shortened, glass-strewn fields. I saw them as delinquents first, lacrosse players second. I shouldn't have been so snobby. They were playing because they enjoyed the game.

By the time I reached college, I played one year of summer ball, but my lack of talent and of size was evident to me then, and I became a spectator. From the bench to bleachers wasn't much of a change, but with the distance I did gain some perspective. I began to enjoy lacrosse for the beauty of the game again. The wizardry of stickwork, the change of winter to spring, the earthy smell of a grass field in the rain. The way Artie Donovan is a purist about football, I'm a purist about lacrosse. I miss the simplicity of the game. The state-of-the-art equipment, the Astroturf fields, the surfer look of the players remind me of what the game can be about at times -- wealth, technology and fashion.

Around Easter, before Sunday family dinners, when the smoke of the first barbecue is in the air and the sun begins to set later, my brothers and I will go into the back yard to play catch. Since there aren't enough sticks to go around we have to dig out my old wooden stick from the basement closet. Careful to avoid my mother's blossoming daffodils in one corner of the yard, we throw the ball around and take turns with the old stick, laugh at its clumsiness, at our clumsiness with it, at its primitive beauty.

We kid each other, "Where'd you steal that from, the Lacrosse Hall of Fame?"

And when it is my turn, when I get it in my hands -- the warped hickory handle worn smooth through the years, the weight of the ball in the stiff pocket, the high arching flight of the ball when I toss it back to one of my brothers -- I know I'll never throw it out. Because this is what lacrosse is all about.

BARNEY KIRBY teaches creative writing at Loyola College.