This past weekend, a few of my close friends and I went south -way south – to a cabin in Elizabethtown, Ill. Although the cabin did its part to disconnect us from most of the outside world, it also helped in reconnecting us with a game we’d almost forgotten.

The idea was one we came up with a few months ago. With summer quickly approaching, and one of my friends soon leaving to spend the entire summer in Wyoming, we wanted one last getaway.

We certainly got away – from civilization, that is. Elizabethtown, Ill., probably doesn’t register on most Mapquest searches. It doesn’t have a Wal-Mart, or basically any mart, from what we could tell. The gas station doubled as the most popular joint in town.

The weekend was a big weekend in the sports world, so I immediately cursed my misfortune of picking the wrong time to be in electronic hell. I tried to keep up with the NFL Draft through occasional text messages, but my phone had about a 30-second window of service before I was in the dark again. With the NHL and NBA playoffs going on at the same time, along with the close of the first month of MLB games, I was definitely out of the loop.

So without the option, or desire, of wasting an entire weekend in front of a computer, my friends and I decided to play a game of whiffleball. Whiffleball, in case you’ve lived the first two decades of your life in a cave, is the game everyone played before they were big enough to hold a bat. Whiffleball is baseball’s younger and more childish brother.

The game is steadfast and simple. It’s fair to guess the parts of a whiffleball set haven’t changed at all since the game’s creation – a thin, yellow plastic bat and a white plastic ball with strategically-placed but widely unappreciated holes in it. No gloves. No bases. Possibly the most low maintenance game ever.

The rules are just as easy. If you don’t swing, it’s not a strike. Three strikes and you’re out, three outs and you’re in the field. Nobody walks. If the pitch hits you, throw it back and stand in again. Pedro Martinez isn’t gunning at you from the pitchers mound, which is a stick approximately 10 feet away, FYI.

Caught in the air and you’re out. If it stops rolling before the pitcher gets to it, it’s a single. Over the pitcher’s head and it’s a double. Over the outfielder’s head – note outfielder is singular, because you only need one – it’s a triple. Into the designated home run area (in our case it was the woods) and it clears the bases.

If you forget who batted last in the previous inning, just make it up. If you forget what the score is or who’s on base, make that up, too. If you hit a home run, admire it because, ‘Hey, you don’t have anywhere to run anyway.’ Ghost runners do that for you. And trash-talking, even done long after the game is over, is vital for a good game of whiffleball. If I forgot to cover something, you know the drill – just make it up.

In your day-to-day, you forget about the things like whiffleball. But out there, basically in the middle of nowhere, I found myself not caring about what was going on in the third round of the draft or how my fantasy baseball team was doing. I was diving for pop flies and fist-pounding my teammates for line drives instead.

Returning to civilization, I can’t help but feel a little more at home. If I want to know the score of the baseball game, I don’t have to search for phone reception, I have to sit down at a computer. But it takes weekends like ours to remember a time when the games, and life, were a whole lot more carefree.

Nathan Grimm is a sophomore in ALS. He can be reached at [email protected].