The annual baseball match in Cairo, Illinois played under softly-sputtering floodlights in the warm lazy air of the early Southern October is rich in small-town charm.
It is an important platform for politicians who've looked after their voters rather more carefully than they've looked after their figures - several are on display sprinkled between the two teams.
More important still in this town that was crippled and left for dead by the vicious racial politics of the late 1960s is the way black and white townsfolk of all ages are gathered together to watch and play. The only obvious sign of division is between the blue team and the yellow.
In the year when it seems increasingly possible that America will elect its first black president, Cairo is a place of hope in Barack Obama's adopted home state of Illinois.
The annual baseball match is an important moment for celebration
It wasn't always the way in this 19th Century riverport and railhead, which was already in decline when the civil rights movement began to demand social justice for African-Americans.
Cairo has endured a past of deep division and intolerance. There was rioting in the sixties - locals will tell you that there are public-buildings pockmarked with bullet strikes that attest to the savagery of the worst of the violence.
Perhaps more damagingly still in the long-term there was an economic boycott of white businesses by black customers which produced a catastrophic collapse in the local economy.
Just awakening
White traders packed and left and no-one moved in to replace them - if Cairo didn't quite die, it went into a kind of coma from which it is only now awakening.
To visit the town's old main street is an eerie and rather shocking experience - you can stand in the middle of Main Street in the middle of Saturday afternoon and see perhaps one moving vehicle every five minutes.
Those who chose to stay are beginning to fight back
Every shop is closed and abandoned and every fa�ade is crumbling. One or two buildings have collapsed and the rubble simply lies uncollected where it fell. This part of Cairo looks like the set for an episode of the Twilight Zone where the set designers got carried away.
Elsewhere there is an abandoned hospital whose buildings are slowly being reclaimed by nature. Everywhere there are spacious homes deserted and crumbling - one or two have trees growing out through the broken windows and dislodging the "For Sale" signs.
A town built to accommodate perhaps 15,000 or 20,000 people is home to no more than 3,000.
But those who chose to stay are beginning to fight back, and Cairo is slowly changing and improving.
I know that Barack Obama knows Cairo's story of despair and hope because he's been there and talked to the town's impressive librarian Monica Smith who does voluntary work as a project co-ordinator - essentially trying to secure state and federal funds for her town.
She said Obama, then an Illinois State Senator was "very interested, very listening and very astute" - a man who would be able to help Cairo if he is able to win the White House.
Cairo has been getting a bad press for a long time
But I wonder if Mr Obama was struck by the way in which you could see Cairo as a kind of parable of life in America during Campaign 2008.
Cairo, you see, has elected to attempt to solve its problems by electing its first black mayor - a retired prison worker called Judson Childs who I met at the baseball game, pitching like a man looking for votes from the batting side.
He is modest about the way he's got the town beginning to work together, speaking simply about how as a Christian he believes that a house divided against itself won't stand and about how the townspeople need to start viewing themselves as one family with one set of problems.
He was amused and politely dismissive when I suggested that Cairo might end up offering a kind of analogy for the whole of America - a place with a troubled racial past electing its first black leader and hoping for a new beginning. Journalists like symbolism; Mr Childs is a pragmatist who wants to get things done.
He offered this thought on the role that racial prejudice might yet play in the national campaign: "You just have to forget about that stuff and think about what a candidate says. Sure, you're probably 10% behind by being black but that's just a few people - the majority of American people aren't like that otherwise it wouldn't have come as far as it has."
Falling into ruin
Cairo has been getting a bad press for a long time.
The novelist Anthony Trollope visited during the Civil War and noted that the only train of the day arrived at 4.30am then left again at 3.30 the following morning.
Almost everyone I spoke to was talking about how an Obama administration might help in some way
He wrote: "Why anyone should ever arrive in Cairo at half-past four am I cannot understand - departure at any hour is easy of comprehension."
Even then Trollope said the town was "falling quickly into ruin".
Today it would be fair to say its problems are still more obvious than its opportunities, but something is beginning to stir and almost everyone I spoke to was talking about how an Obama administration might help in some way.
If he wins, it will be interesting to see how he deals with the expectations he has raised in places like this but for the moment the prospect of an Obama victory has created a moment of optimism in a place which has not experienced too many of them over the years.
At one point during the baseball game the floodlights went out and the little crowd sang "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" together under the night sky. It was a touching moment - not the first time that the people of Cairo have sat together in darkness awaiting the return of the light.
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Those who chose to stay are beginning to fight back
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