The 18th hole at South Park Golf Course will never be known as the game's greatest finishing hole. To most, it merely is a hole where a round of golf finishes.

As a teen, though, it was my Augusta. My Pebble Beach. A place to play against Watson or Nicklaus with everything on the line. No matter that I was lugging my own bag, ducking slices from adjoining holes or ignoring the chatter of old men who flocked like magpies to the greenside, government-issue picnic benches.

This was my safe place to dream and think. I could take it one shot at a time and stay in the moment.

It still is that place after all these years.

I don't care if the pace of play is glacially slow or I'm paired with some former jock who loves golf, but his blue-collar loyalties force him to despise golfers (especially lawyer golfers). This is the only place where memories of my youth can be summoned. Indeed, they are otherwise blurred with time.

I can't remember a single class from high school or the prom or anything else that matters from those years. Yet, I can remember details of obscure conversations on those fairways, the names of playing partners from decades ago, and the taste of an overdone rotisserie hot dog, washed down with a Schneider's grape drink. It's all triggered with the smell of dry roasting cut grass or the unwanted waft of a cheap cigar.

Like many young men back in the day, I learned the game after school, when the shadows grew long and merged into a blanket of dusk. The race was on to finish before dark. But even in the blackness, there was a simple reminder that play was over and it was time to re-enter the real world.

The 18th hole at South Park dips down and up in a "v" shape. About 10 yards from the bottom, when the sun is all but gone, the temperature drops as many degrees and rises again with every step toward the crest.

This valley of cool, moist summery air is a 27-step-long invisible boundary that sends me back again to those simple, yet confusing days of teendom.

Once I cross it, my past stays behind. What a great finishing hole.