In the summer of 2004, I needed a place to live in Chicago.

Boy, did I find one.

I was 24 years old and had landed a job as a producer and anchor at ESPN 1000 after a long and sometimes frustrating attempt to break back into radio after my first job went south in Indianapolis. I started that February and spent the first several months commuting from my parents’ house in the western suburbs, saving a little money while trying to figure out what came next.

By the end of the summer, it was clear. I needed to move closer to work.

My college buddy John was looking for a place too. We had worked together at student radio at Indiana University, and by then he was the PR director for the Chicago Fire. This was 2004, so we did what apartment hunters did back then: pored over online listings, traded emails and searched Craigslist which, believe it or not, was once a perfectly reasonable place to find somewhere to live.

That’s how we found Ed.

He was around our age, worked as a bar manager at the House of Blues and needed two roommates for his three-bedroom apartment. We met. We got along. The arrangement made sense.

Three guys. Three separate leases. $500 apiece.

The apartment had three bedrooms, one bathroom, no laundry and no dishwasher. We eventually bought a portable one.

None of that mattered.

The address was 3621 N. Sheffield Avenue.

Across the street from Wrigley Field.

Not near Wrigley Field. Not a couple of blocks away. Across the street, right around the right-field foul pole. You can still see the building on television today.

God bless it. It’s still hanging on.

Looking back, our living arrangement sounds like the premise of a television show or movie that never got made. Three single guys in their 20s sharing an apartment across the street from Wrigley Field. John was the PR director for the Chicago Fire. Ed was a bar manager at the House of Blues. I was a producer and anchor at ESPN 1000.

Between the three of us, we had Chicago’s entertainment market pretty well cornered. Concerts. Sporting events. Bars. Needed help getting in somewhere? Whatever was happening around the city, one of us usually had a connection.

And if we didn’t, we still lived across the street from Wrigley Field.

It was also exactly the right era for three guys like us. Old School, Dodgeball and Anchorman were in constant rotation, part of the Frat Pack era of comedies that sometimes felt as if they were playing by rules similar to those of our own little world. We played video games, chased women, drank a lot, and found our way into places we probably couldn’t afford.

And then there were Monday nights, when we’d race home on the L to watch 24 on TiVo.

It was a good time to be in your 20s.

I moved in during September 2004, which, for anyone who remembers that Cubs season, was a particularly miserable time to introduce yourself to Wrigleyville. A team expected to do something special collapsed down the stretch and missed the postseason. I was moving in as Sammy Sosa was moving out. I didn’t bring a boom box and he didn’t take one with him if you know the story.

By the time I arrived, there were only a handful of home games left, and the prevailing mood around the neighborhood was less Welcome to Wrigleyville and more Thank God that’s over.

Then came winter.

For several months, Wrigley Field was simply the enormous old ballpark across the street. The crowds disappeared. The neighborhood settled down. I got used to the Red Line rumbling past the back of our building and the chimes from the Addison station, followed by the automated announcement I can still hear in my head.

Doors closing.

Our apartment was pretty standard for three guys in their 20s. High ceilings. A narrow hallway leading from the front door to the main room where everybody gathered. We had a television and a shelf filled with DVDs, which once started to collapse before I made a diving save straight out of Andy Garcia in The Untouchables to protect the floor. To this day, I consider it one of my greatest mundane athletic achievements.

My bedroom had a window that opened to a breezeway, which meant I could open the shades and stare directly at a brick wall. My roommates had windows facing the parking lot next door, and the main room gave us a perfect view of the action around Sheffield and Addison.

That view is gone now. There’s a building where the parking lot once stood.

But we had it at a good time.

The back porch was another story. Nobody really sat out there because the L was right behind us. It reminded me of the scene in The Blues Brothers when Jake asks how often the train goes by and Elwood tells him, “So often you won’t even notice it.”

He was right.

Eventually, I didn’t.

The jarring part came when I’d go home to my parents’ house for Christmas. I’d lie in bed and realize it was too quiet.

The silence was uncomfortable.

I had lived across the street from Wrigley Field for seven months before I finally understood what that really meant.

Then came Opening Day 2005.

The noise. The excitement. The optimism Cubs fans somehow manage to summon every spring, regardless of what happened the year before.

Suddenly, we were in the middle of all of it.

The neighborhood came alive. Thousands of people descended upon our front yard. The bars filled. The music started. The organ played. The PA announcer echoed from across the street. The L kept unloading more people at Addison.

It was a party.

And when it was over, I remember having another realization.

We’re going to do this 80 more times?

Whoa.

On a Friday in July with a 1:20 first pitch, you could feel the neighborhood changing by 10 in the morning. You heard the organ. The announcements. The vendors. The music. The crowd.

And the bucket boys.

We definitely heard the bucket boys.

There were many afternoons when I came very close to handing them one of my dad’s USG Sheetrock buckets. If you’re going to bang on those things outside my window all afternoon, the least you can do is give the family business some free advertising.

The biggest games were spectacles. The Red Sox came to Wrigley for the first time since the 1918 World Series. The White Sox came north for the Crosstown Classic. It didn’t matter who was visiting. When there was a big game at Wrigley, we were at the center of the city.

But there were ordinary games, too.

Cold April Tuesdays. Meaningless September afternoons. Nights when the Cubs weren’t very good and there were actually empty seats at Wrigley Field, something that feels almost foreign now.

Sometimes I’d be sitting at home in the second inning and decide, fine, I’m going in.

I’d walk across the street. There were times when an usher who recognized me from around the neighborhood would just wave me through. I’d grab a scorecard and sit by myself in the upper deck, wearing a winter coat because it was 42 degrees and you could feel the wind coming off the lake.

It didn’t matter.

I was at Wrigley.

I grew up more of a Cubs fan than a White Sox fan, although when I was a kid in the western suburbs, the Crosstown rivalry felt much different. The teams didn’t play each other. The Crosstown Classic was a myth. When the Cubs were home, you could go see the Cubs. When the White Sox were home, you could go see the White Sox.

Then came 2005.

That year, I was working as a producer for the White Sox radio network when they won the World Series.

And every night, I went home to an apartment across from Wrigley Field.

Surreal doesn’t begin to cover it.

The apartment itself was always happening. People came and went. There were nights when someone slept on our couch and I didn’t know who they were. There were even a few famous athletes who crashed there after having a little too much to drink on the rooftop above us.

That rooftop was actually separate from our part of the building. The first and second floors were residential, while the rooftop and the floor beneath it had a different entrance around the back.

Nobody understood this.

So during Cubs games, random people would constantly walk up our staircase and then stand there looking confused.

“I’m with Pepsi.”

Go round back.

“We’re here for the rooftop.”

Go round back.

“Is this the entrance?”

Go round back.

We said it over and over and over again. International tourists. Kids. Corporate groups. Drunk people.

Even an inebriated Bulls player.

That story can wait for another day.

Our own favorite spot was the front porch. We had enough room for six or eight chairs, with more people sitting on the steps. The refrigerators were always stocked with beer, and if we ran out, Bob in the front studio apartment could usually help us out.

We’d sit there during Cubs games, drinking, talking sports and watching WGN. The television was about 10 seconds behind what was actually happening across the street, so the crowd would tell us when something big had happened before the broadcast could.

We’d hear 40,000 people roar.

Then we’d wait for the television to tell us why.

Those were also the days when the three of us had enough connections to live far better than our paychecks suggested we should.

In 2005, I went to about 30 Bulls games. After years of awful basketball following Michael Jordan’s retirement, the Bulls were suddenly good again, and I couldn’t get enough.

It helped that the ESPN 1000 sales department sometimes had a hard time giving away all its tickets to sponsors. At about 5:30 in the afternoon, I’d get the call.

I’ve got two if you want them.

Yes, I wanted them.

My roommates benefited from those calls. So did some random first dates who may have briefly believed I was a far wealthier and more connected man than I actually was.

That illusion usually didn’t survive very long.

I once took a woman named Amy, whom I’d been trying to convince to go out with me for weeks, to a Bulls game and landed third-row seats. She was dressed perfectly for the club, which, as it turned out, was also perfectly appropriate for the third row at the United Center.

People looked at her.

Then they looked at me.

I could almost see them wondering what exactly I did for a living.

I enjoyed the confusion.

Later that night, she discovered that I actually did live across the street from Wrigley Field, something she hadn’t entirely believed until I walked her through the front door.

We had a drink. Went out to a couple of bars. She eventually grabbed a cab home.

We never went out again.

But for one night, I had third-row Bulls tickets, a beautiful date and an apartment across the street from Wrigley Field.

I had proven my point.

Living at the L meant we could get almost anywhere. The Addison Red Line station was practically our front door. I could take about 15 steps, hop on a train, get off at State Street and walk into the ABC building for work at ESPN 1000.

This was before Uber, but living at Wrigley meant there was never much trouble finding a cab.

My car was mostly an annoyance.

I needed it because I was also doing stringing work for the Chicago Tribune and broadcasting for local radio stations in the suburbs. That meant occasionally leaving our little world at Sheffield and Addison.

Coming back was the problem.

There were Friday nights when I’d return from covering high school sports just as thousands of people were descending upon Wrigleyville’s bars. I’d circle block after block after block, sometimes for an hour, looking for somewhere to parallel park.

All I wanted to do was go home.

But I learned something pretty quickly about complaining as a Wrigleyville resident.

If you don’t like it, don’t live there.

Forty thousand Cubs fans didn’t need to accommodate my nap. The L didn’t need to stop running because I wanted to sleep. The bucket boys weren’t going to relocate because I wanted to hear the Bears game on television.

I knew where I lived.

And I was lucky to live there.

There were celebrities, too.

When the Cubs traded for Nomar Garciaparra, who had married Mia Hamm months earlier, she occasionally came to Wrigley. One day, I spotted her trying to quietly make her way from the L through the parking lot toward a back entrance to the bleachers.

I recognized her.

I was also about three beers deep.

So my greeting was perhaps slightly more enthusiastic than the discretion she was attempting called for.

She turned, a little embarrassed, and waved.

The five of us cheered.

Then we let her go on her way.

That’s the most Midwest thing about it. We didn’t need her autograph. We were just happy to say hi.

Then Hollywood showed up.

During the 2005 All-Star break, The Break-Up was filming at Wrigley Field. The production set up in the parking lot next to our building, and thousands of extras filled the ballpark for the scenes.

Vince Vaughn came out one day after a long shoot and was signing autographs. I attempted to take a selfie with him in an era when people didn’t really do that yet.

It came out terribly.

The better story happened the next morning.

I was leaving for work when I noticed the production had set up a breakfast buffet in the parking lot.

There was sausage.

Eggs.

Bacon.

Orange juice.

The orange juice was especially important because Ed had used all of ours the night before to make screwdrivers for his girlfriend, and I was still irrationally annoyed about it.

So I did what any resourceful 25-year-old would do.

I got in line.

I apparently looked enough like someone who worked on a movie set that nobody questioned me. At one point, a guy started making conversation and asked how long I’d been doing this.

“A couple years,” I said.

That was the end of the conversation.

Nobody cared.

I ate my sausage. My eggs. My bacon.

And, most importantly, I had my orange juice.

The breakfast was glorious.

More importantly, it was free.

At 25, that was a big deal.

There were plenty of other nights.

New Year’s Eve was chaos, but at least we didn’t have to travel far for some of the best parties in Chicago. There was always a good breakfast joint nearby. Taco Bell remained reliable until 4 in the morning.

And there was the time Ed and I made a bet. I have no memory of what the bet was about, but I remember the payoff. The loser had to pay for a night out wherever the winner wanted to go.

I lost.

Ed took me to a gay bar in East Lakeview.

On a Tuesday.

It was show-tunes karaoke night.

I don’t remember the bet.

I remember the payoff.

There were drunken nights. There were women who came and went. There were parties that seemed to start in the morning and never really stop.

Nothing that three single guys in their 20s wouldn’t appreciate.

When people say they enjoyed their 20s, I know exactly what they mean.

I spent two of the best years of mine living across the street from one of the most iconic sports venues in the world.

I’d like to say I knew exactly how good I had it.

I didn’t.

I knew I was having fun. I knew the apartment was ridiculous. I knew our lives occasionally felt like one of those Frat Pack movies we kept watching on DVD.

But at 24 or 25, you don’t necessarily understand how specific a moment is while you’re living it. I had spent four great years at Indiana University, and in many ways, Lakeview felt like an extension of college life. The setting was just better. The stakes were a little higher. We had jobs now.

And somehow, between ESPN 1000, the Chicago Fire and the House of Blues, we had just enough access to live far better than our bank accounts suggested we should.

Eventually, though, it was time to go.

After two years, I landed a job at NBC doing morning news. That required me to get up very early, which meant going to bed very early.

That wasn’t going to work across the street from Wrigley Field.

There was also a falling-out among the roommates, and the three of us went our separate ways. That’s how these things happen sometimes.

My final day at 3621 Sheffield was Oct. 1, 2006.

The Cubs were playing. It was raining. The team didn’t particularly seem to want to be there. The fans didn’t particularly seem to want to be there.

And I was trying to move out during a baseball game, which was about as convenient as it sounds. Just getting to my own building was difficult. I had to carry my things up and down the back staircase while the final game of another disappointing Cubs season played out across the street.

It was a good reminder.

It was time to go.

Ten years later, the Cubs finally reached the World Series.

The morning after they clinched the National League pennant in 2016, I got in my car and drove to Arizona, where I had just accepted a new job.

I watched the entire World Series from there, most of it alone.

I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

I needed that moment for myself.

Of course I thought about 3621 Sheffield. I thought about what it must have been like to live there during that glorious October, with the entire neighborhood holding its breath and then finally exploding after 108 years.

Maybe that would have been too much.

I had already gotten my two years.

I haven’t been back to Wrigley Field lately, but I’m determined to get down there soon with my daughters. They’re still too young to fully understand just how much fun their dad might have been before they came along.

Someday, they’ll be old enough.

I’ll show them the building. I’ll tell them about the three guys who lived there. The $500 rent. The Bulls games. The porch. The L. The free movie-set breakfast. Maybe even some of the stories that didn’t make it into this column.

They’ll ask how in the world I did all of that.

I’ll give them the right smile.

They’ll immediately cringe.

And maybe I’ll walk up to 3621 Sheffield and knock on the front door to see if someone will let me inside.

If I accidentally go to the wrong entrance, I already know what they’ll tell me.

Go round back.

***

Matt Rodewald is a four-time Emmy Award-winning broadcaster whose work has also earned the Illinois Broadcasters Association Silver Dome Award, the Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award, and an INSPRA Award of Excellence. After more than two decades in television, radio, and play-by-play, he writes essays exploring sports, nostalgia, and the people behind the games.