ABERDEEN -- On opening night at Ripken Stadium, Don Morrison stood in a section behind home plate, hand over heart, wowed by booming fireworks and a brassy national anthem and reflecting on a skinny kid named Calvin who came to play baseball on his team at Aberdeen High back in 1975.

He wasn't Cal then -- that name belonged to Cal Ripken Sr., one of Morrison's idols. Instead, he was a 5-foot-6 teen-ager "who was just one of the group, because that's what he wanted to be," Morrison said. "He was always a very quietly confident kid. Never showed off."

It was a little different this night. The skinny kid had become a baseball legend, and now owner and chief promoter of his own team and stadium. And on a night when 6,000 fans longed to sidle up to their hometown hero, Morrison already had. The former coach spent a few minutes with his former infielder and pitcher in the brand new Aberdeen Ironbirds dugout.

"Pretty cool, huh, Coach?" Ripken said to Morrison about his new digs, set on the edge of the hard-working town where he'd learned the game.

"Beautiful," Morrison murmured now, listening to members of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra play "The Star-Spangled Banner" and watching fireworks explode and roaring military jets sweep low over the stadium.

Everybody knows Cal could have taken this game to any town and made it big, Morrison said, but he came back home. "He could have done it anywhere. It's exceptional because of the kind of person he is -- if you think about family values and what's important in life."

As he spoke, cheers rang loudly for Ripken and the new team. As the din filled the twilight, Morrison sat down on a seat still wet from an earlier downpour. He leaned closer, shaking his head and smiling. Think about it, he said: Hometown boy becomes baseball great, then comes home to build a park in honor of his dad. If you wrote it in a novel, Morrison said, you couldn't sell it. People would think it was too Hollywood, too hokey.

Yet tonight, here was Ripken, front-office man on the field of his dreams. A long way from the skinny boy who was "a coach's dream," yet somehow still the same, hanging back amid the hoopla, just waiting for the first pitch.

There was a time, years ago, Morrison said, when Ripken wasn't seen as an infielder by the majors. They wanted him to pitch. That's not what Cal wanted. "He never wanted to sit on the bench," Morrison said.

But the Orioles took a chance on the kid from Aberdeen. A good thing they did, too, he noted. "The whole story would be different."