A beaming Tom Wilson bops back to the dugout having accomplished a rare feat of sports perfection at any level: five hits in five at bats. His softball teammates high-five him and slap him on the back.

After the game, a lopsided victory, the players gather at the manager's truck. Cold drinks and animated conversation flow. But the celebration ends early for Mr. Wilson. He must hurry to the hospital for radiation treatment of prostate cancer.

Mr. Wilson is one of seven members of his Howard County-based seniors team who will turn 70 or older this year. Doctors discovered the cancer after his quadruple-bypass surgery in January, which followed a major heart attack in November.

Open-heart surgery couldn't sideline him; he was hitting and fielding with his teammates three months later. Cancer couldn't either; he scheduled his radiation treatments in the afternoons so that he could continue playing softball in the mornings.

"When I quit playing softball, I'll be admitting I'm half-dead," says Mr. Wilson, who will turn 70 in November. "I've oftentimes said: 'If I drop over running to first base, just dig a hole and put me in it.' "

That attitude is typical of his Maryland Old-Liners teammates and their wives. They charge through life providing a portrait of the elderly often overlooked in this youth-oriented culture.

Like players on a softball team late in the game, they all want their turn at bat before the final out.

"One reason we don't dwell on getting old is we don't have time to think about it," says Virginia Varner, 70, wife of Karl Varner, a vigorous Old-Liners outfielder two months shy of 71.

A younger person occasionally remarks on the quickening flight of time, but older people watch incredulously as it steals away every day.

Maurice "Mo" Mercier, 70, has a first baseman's stretch as elastic asthat of any man his age. He also has a grandfather clock in the hallway of his Ellicott City home.

"I wind it every Sunday of my life," says Mr. Mercier, a former salesman for a drug company. "But it seems like it's only been three or four days and I'm winding that thing again."

They don't bemoan the inevitable; they take a different tack. As young people they squandered time on pursuits of passion, ambition and materialistic fulfillment. But now they fill their days with satisfying and meaningful ventures.

"As you get older you can place some of the things you once thought important in perspective," says Mr. Varner, a Catonsville resident retired from careers as a juvenile-services counselor and a United Methodist minister. "I'm talking about sex, the pressure of getting your next job, of making more money.

"You're released from some of those competitions. You're better able to draw back from the forest and see some of the trees."

The trees, more often than not for this bunch, rise beyond the outfield fences of ballparks near and far. Although softball hardly defines this group of full-speed-ahead seniors, it is the activity that unites them.

The Maryland Old-Liners play an astonishing 70 to 80 games from April to October. Thirty-two are against their eight competitors in the Baltimore Beltway League, an alliance of 60-and-older teams from Bowie to Dundalk to Westminster.

The Old-Liners' home field is Cedar Lane Park in Columbia. They play Monday and Wednesday mornings. And then they practice Fridays.

Their manager, Nick Hozik, who turns 70 in December, thinks his team is the oldest in the league -- and the team with the warmest camaraderie among players and wives. Many have played together since 1988.

A string of medals

Along the way, they won four consecutive gold medals, 1990 through 1993, in the Maryland Senior Olympics 65-and-older division, and a silver medal in the 1991 National Senior Olympics in Syracuse, N.Y. They have competed twice in the Seniors Softball World Series.

Their wives travel to the tournaments and attend softball outings but don't usually attend the weekday games. Nor, mostly, does anybody else. The Old-Liners usually play on isolated fields with empty bleachers -- simply for the joy of it.

The contrast to the strike by major league baseball players is apparent.

"Those guys are getting paid for doing what most of us would do for nothing," says Mr. Wilson, who grew up playing sandlot baseball. "And here we are out there at our age just because we enjoy it."

'It means everything'

How much does softball mean to these men?

Ethel Hetzner, 75, wife of the oldest player on the team, Paul Hetzner, 72, drills an answer as if it were a throw from the hole at shortstop:

"It means everything."

Mr. Hetzner, a first baseman resembling Boog Powell in size and spirit, doesn't deny it.

"I've had two operations since playing in this league," says Mr. Hetzner, who lives in the city and operated a crane in an East Baltimore steel mill for 35 years. "I blew my arm out the first year. And my knee, I blew that out too."

He tore cartilage in his right knee in early summer 1991, three months before his 69th birthday.

"I limped the whole season," he says. "I wasn't going to let them do surgery and miss six weeks."

His knee still hurts. It's one of three places in his body racked by arthritis.

"But I still go full out," he says. "I can't loaf. Never have, never will. Some mornings after I play ball though, that's the hardest part of my life, just getting up."

Mr. Mercier, the other first baseman, plays with a painful quadriceps pull. That's the large muscle at the front of the thigh. He pulled it trying to beat out a swinging bunt.

"I used to be able to run out a home run without thinking I was going to die," he says. "Now I'm that way getting to third, or even second."

No injury worries

L Does he ever consider not playing because he might get hurt?

"It's never crossed my mind," he says. "I'm more concerned with getting a damn good hit."

Mr. Varner, the retired minister, felt a twinge in his chest warming up on a scorching June morning. He saw his doctor later because he'd felt a similar twinge before his heart attack when he was 59. That resulted in quadruple-bypass surgery, like Mr. Wilson's. The twinge in June was angina. Mr. Varner sat out two weeks while undergoing tests, then, with his doctor's permission, resumed playing.

But all team members, regardless of ailments, tip their red hats this season to Mr. Wilson. He is a retired Army officer who then was a civilian employee at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station. A resident of Silver Spring, he is a quiet, steady player and the team poet.

He composes a poem every season. Last year's was "Maryland Old-Liners Manager's Lament," about how the players weren't playing well so the manager had them checked out medically. The last of the 10 verses reads:

They finally diagnosed what ails us,

All the tests would fill a page.

You'll have to live with it, manager,

Their problem is just old age.

But the oldest of the Old-Liners don't view aging as a problem. They see it as a culmination, almost a celebration, of seven decades of living.

Now they're comfortable financially, no longer driven by materialistic pursuits. But they say their drive never was as intense as that of today's young people, who want everything at once.

"We didn't have a lot when we were children," says Kathy Becker, whose husband, Howard "Fritz" Becker, is the Old-Liners agile 70-year-old shortstop. "I grew up never feeling I was going to get everything I wanted. Now, we're forever trying to figure out what to get each other for birthdays and holidays. We don't need anything anymore."

They're thankful that rearing children is behind them. Who would dare raise teen-agers today? But they cherish their grandchildren, who help keep them young.

A sense of humor

And their sense of humor, they cherish that too. When you're 70, they say, you'd better be able to laugh at yourself.

"I'm always wondering why I went upstairs, or why I came downstairs," says Mr. Hozik, the manager, who lives in Clarksville. "And my wife's always looking for her keys. I tell her, 'If you can't find them anywhere, look in the refrigerator.' "

The best thing about growing older, they say, is being free to choose how to spend their time. Retirement liberated them, and they were prepared to embrace it. They had had outside interests for years; they merely added new ones after retiring.

Mr. Mercier had seen what can happen when you retire and have nothing to do.

"My daddy, when he retired, he retired to the front porch," he says. "And he went fast."

So what does it matter if Mr. Mercier's coordination at first base is off a little, if he's lost strength in his arms and legs, if in the past five years his bowling average has dropped 10 pins and his golf score has increased 10 strokes?

You won't find him or the others on the couch in front of the television, except perhaps for a ballgame. You especially won't find them sopping up soap operas.

"Oh," cringes Mr. Mercier's wife, Anna Mary, 72, "you'd have to put me away if I sat and watched those things."

Busy is better

Here, for example, is how one 70-year-old Old-Liner spends most of his time:

Mr. Varner, the retired minister, walks five miles a day, rides a 10-speed bicycle, drives the van at the Catonsville senior center, spades his 20-by-30-foot garden by hand instead of with a machine, takes care of the yard, bowls in a league with softball teammates from September to May, plays volleyball with them during the winter, travels with his wife and reads religious, economic and political books and journals "to keep my mind alert and grasping for answers." He plays golf and tennis occasionally.

"I like them both," he says. "But I don't find time to play them as much as I'd like."

Mr. Varner is typical of this group. And so is his wife, a full-time elementary school teacher for 32 years who still, at 70, substitutes in Baltimore County. She walks two miles a day, gardens and plays tennis with teachers young enough to be her daughters.

"Some days I don't feel like it," she says. "But after you get up and get going, the aches and pains go away, and you begin to feel better."

They all realize, entering their eighth decade, that fewer years lie ahead than stretch behind.

"We don't fear death," Mrs. Becker says. "I fear a lot of pain before death. But we have our faith, so we'll rely on prayer and a lot of hope that when we leave this world it'll be as peacefully as possible."

The Beckers, who live in Silver Spring, have enclosed their porch for a future bedroom. It will probably be Mrs. Becker's, they say, when her arthritis finally prevents her from climbing stairs.

Health concerns

Most of the players and their wives watch their diets. They keep active for the fun of it, but also because it's healthful.

The Merciers quit smoking five years ago -- after she had an aneurysm and he had twin ulcers. Mrs. Mercier, despite being a nurse in the Navy, smoked two packs a day. Her husband smoked three.

Their sense of taste and smell, ruined by cigarettes, quickly returned. Mrs. Mercier quit coughing, and Mr. Mercier regained his breath.

"Reaching 70 has bothered me a little bit," Mr. Mercier says. "I don't know how many more years I've got to live. If I've got until my early 80s, that's not very far away. I don't feel like it should be that soon, damn it."

And Mr. Wilson, undergoing seven weeks of radiation treatments, says, "I'm grateful I've been able to live as long as I have. I don't know how these treatments are going to turn out. But I'll accept whatever happens.

"Acceptance grows along with aging. You can't change everything. . . . When it comes, it comes. I'll accept it. What else can you do?"

"Oh, you're much too ornery, Thomas," his wife, Margot, says gently. "Much too ornery to die."

Then Mrs. Wilson, who turns 70 next month, laughs and says this is her daily devotion:

"God, if you want me, then you can have me, but please not just yet."

The opening prayer

The Maryland Old-Liners begin every game with a prayer. The men form a circle in front of their dugout and hold hands. They bow their heads, and someone, maybe Mr. Becker, maybe Mr. Varner, begins:

Lord, thank you for this day, and the opportunity to come out and play another game. Let us conduct ourselves in a manner that is pleasing to you. Protect us from injury, and protect the opposing team as well. Amen.

And then the men in their red-and-white uniforms trot onto the field. It's a cool morning near the end of their season. One more time, the umpire says play ball.