After some serious subjects in Impromptus today, I have some lighter ones — well, this is serious too, in its own way. I talk about my little lefty hometown of Ann Arbor, Mich. (as I’m wont to do). A friend of mine from Ann Arbor told me a story the other day. He knows a little girl there, about ten. Plays on the field-hockey team. After a game, he asked her, “Well, how did it go?” She said, “We’re not allowed to keep score — but if we were, we won 5 to 3.”

That’s very human, isn’t it? Not even Ann Arbor can stamp out the human (try as they might).

Readers have been sending in their own “impromptus.” A woman in Virginia wrote,

“Five years ago, my five-year-old son was playing T-ball for the first time in our local Little League. My husband was his coach. In T-ball they don’t keep score, since they reason that the kids are just learning how to play. [That, I can endorse. Ten-year-old girls in field hockey? Not as sure.] So in they came from a game one Saturday morning, and one of my other children asked Patrick, ‘Did your team win?’ My husband looked at us with a big grin and said, ‘They tied.’ My little Patrick turned around and said incredulously, ‘What, again??!!’”

Another “sports” item, so to speak? This relates to yesterday’s column, which mentioned the charming way a “Journolister” spoke of conservatives: “[effing] NASCAR retards.” A reader writes, “What’s with the liberals’ anathematization of NASCAR? They would love it: watching a bunch of people turn left, over and over . . .”