Locker Room:Saturday night, Sunday morning and it's freezing here in the attic. The brass monkey who did the secretarial work for a while called in the union and quit some time ago. Apart from an Inuit tribesperson last seen building a rudimentary igloo over behind the slag heap I call the old-newspapers-and-stuff section, nobody has dared set foot in the place for some time.

Anyway such is the pre-industrial revolution tundra from which this column gets mined and hauled to the surface without the help of elves or cheap migrant labour. Tonight I'm colder than a well-digger's ass and have repetitive-stress injuries from examining closed shafts looking for old columns to recycle.

It's one of those nights when it seems everything interesting has already been written about by more interesting people.

Enough about my sufferings, however. This column has been a cry for help for many years now but I understand that you all have busy lives and have worthwhile things to do. That's fine.

I actually began with the fairly commonplace observation about the critical temperature up here because, firstly, this is a column pretty much devoted to the business of commonplace observation and, secondly, although the cold usually makes me feel old and thin-blooded, tonight it brings me back to being young.

We have a match to go to tomorrow and the night before a match is always a little bit pregnant with pleasurable anticipation. There is a fly in the ointment of my general wellbeing, however. Tomorrow, early in the morning, a man will walk with his dog across a field and by applying such proven empirical measures as the squelchiness test and the drowning-of-ducks inspection matrix will determine if the pitch is playable.

This brings me back. Reared among ruffians, I myself was a child of delicate disposition. Being unable to shoulder charge my way through the steam after a hot shower was a handicap as was my general athletic pace, which was described as being slower than a wet week with a funeral on the Wednesday and some serious mourning involved. Delicate.

I wasn't tough. As Uncle Monty remarks in Withnail and I, as a youth I used weep in butchers' shops. I spent comparatively little of that youth playing football and hurling but most of my time wondering if the pitches would be playable at the weekend.

We were an Evening Press household, and Wednesday's edition carried an exhaustive list of the fixtures scheduled to be played on the following weekend, right down the Under-15 F , Special Section, Losers' Shield, Back-Door Playoff, Last-Chance Saloon, 35-a-Side games or other auspicious occasions when I might be brought on for a thrilling but brief appearance as a substitute.

(In fairness, I played more often than I should have; popping me on as a sub even late in injury time was seen as an act of daring that bordered on reckless arrogance, a gesture comparable in its hubris only with the withdrawing of the rest of the team, leaving just a goalkeeper to defend.)

Anyway, there was very little point in getting excited about any of this until Friday evenings, when the back page of the Press might bring the bad news enclosed in a modest little black-bordered box, framed like the death notice it was: All Corporation Pitches Unplayable This Weekend And Until Further Notice.

It wasn't necessarily that every match I played was fixed for a Corporation pitch, more the fact that if the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Barbados can cause a hurricane in Florida then the rescheduling of one game from a Corporation pitch to a club ground would cause a domino effect of shifted games and altered times which would result eventually in the least-significant game of the entire weekend having to be cancelled. As a result I played only three games in 11 years.

I hated the weather and its movie-starlet caprices. Even on a Sunday morning two days after the pampered Corpo pitches had been given the all-clear in the Evening Press, it would come as no surprise to learn that a dog peeing in a neighbouring post code on Saturday had caused a sufficient raising of the water table to render All Corporation Pitches Unplayable.

I was transported back to all those years of sedentary worry as I sat here listening to the weather rattling around above the skylights, the rain making pitches unplayable even as I went flicking through topics to make this a better column.

I had rejected many good ideas (no, really) before deciding to write about the renaissance of the Boston Celtics NBA side this year. Having opted for this topic I grabbed a handful of basketball books and began looking for stuff to loot.

Something brilliant came to hand, however, and instantly looking at the celebrated opening pages of John Updike's Rabbit Run I was sorry this column is often so coarse and irrelevant; sorry I never played much basketball in my life; sorry the weather of my youth was so pernicious and meanwhile basketballers played away in halls and gyms happy as church mice.

Updike's opening few pages are that good. Rabbit Angstrom cutting home from work through an alley encounters some boys playing basketball. Rabbit could play a little in his day and he joins the boys to scrimmage. The old feeling comes back to his blood, and he realises that games are the great, seductive beauty of youth, the things which determine if you will be a grain of sand or a great mountain.

His bones recall the love as he watches a young player on the loose-pebble court, gliding "on a blessing" . . . "With luck he'll become, in time, a crack athlete in the High School. Rabbit knows the way. You climb up through the little grades and then get to the top and everybody cheers: with the sweat in your eyebrows you can't see very well and the noise swirls around you and lifts you up and then you're out, not forgotten at first, just out and it feels good and cool and free. You're out and sort of melt, and keep lifting, until you become like, to these kids, just one more piece of the sky of adults that hangs over them in the town."

As an evocative piece of writing about sport and age and the perfume of regret, Updike's opening paragraphs are unsurpassed in modern fiction.

And we thought of Rabbit as we sat here, thought of him long before we reached for the book and thought of him after he had usefully suggested a theme for this column.

Those limber, sunkissed days are short, the days when everybody cheers as you climb up the grades. Those are the times that go too quick, the times that stay in your own memory longer than they do in anybody else's.

The GPA got their grant this past week and the roof didn't cave in. Various soccer players who have in the past offered us their view that they would do anything for the green jersey have been having their spoke about who they would employ in the Ireland management job. Ricky Hatton and Floyd Mayweather have shaped up comically in Vegas for one of those uninspiring and disrespectful bouts.

It's all money and we ain't against that, but where will we find the wonder and strength to get us back to our daydreams when playing is all that matters?

It's freezing up here and the rain is slapping the skylight and in the morning there will be a pitch inspection and, I'll bet, no match.

The key is to get to Rabbit's age and know that you still enjoy it, still love it. After that everything else is forgivable.