That field of dreams on which some 30,000 looked and embraced it was so many times denied us all, so often a deal dead. Tampa Bay has always wanted big-time baseball beyond the appetizers of spring, and was so long and so often tempted after longtime efforts of persuasion came close but were in the end denied.

Then, with the Buccaneers of the NFL in old Tampa, the soccer Rowdies proven and so many apparently on the side of Tampa for big-league baseball permanency, two farsighted workaholics, Bob Humphries and Ed McGinty, and a few others decided to go for a major league franchise, one way or another, by theft after enticement, or, the more formal expansion route.

But, they needed help from the monied and the influential beyond their own means. They went to see a Tampa visionary, the well-connected Frank Morsani, and asked if he would head the effort. Yes, he said, if the group was a good one and wanted him. And it was — oh, with people like Ted Couch, Art Pepin and Joe Casper, for starters.

Well, they went after the Minnesota Twins first. Minnesota had let it be known the Twins would like a change of venue, or, as they all say, a different deal. Morsani and associates went to Washington, D.C. to do a deal for 42 percent of the team. It was looking good, until Minnesota owner Carl Pohlad said he’d do the deal and keep the team in place, just what baseball itself wanted to hear.

The Morsani team regrouped. By now a rich man with close Tampa ties, Bill Mack, joined the effort and went after the Texas Ranger, Jim Cusack was the Mack man here. George W. Bush was the governor of Texas at the time. He frowned on the Eddie Chiles agreement to sell in a Texas meeting with Morsani. I was there. It was a deal… until the commissioner of baseball, Peter Ueberroth, vetoed it.

Meanwhile, the Oakland A’s talked of moving to Tampa for a while, but that faded away, too.

Finally, the majors decided that Tampa Bay was a candidate, then a choice, but… the expansion committee awarded the franchise to a group other than that of Frank Morsani, one that would in time be led by Vince Naimoli, who would name them the Devil Rays. Now, the Devil Rays are the Rays, owned by Stuart Sternberg. Might want to repeat that and on a separate line.

The Rays, the league-leading, wonderful, inexplicable, positively impossibly good Rays are owned by a group headed by Sternberg. They are solid, from catcher, around the horn, through the pitching mound, bullpen, outfield and bench, managers and coaches and batboys, through the announcing booth to ole Rick Nafe, the former lineman now a baseball executive of the finest club anywhere.

Tampa Bay Manager Joe Maddon — boy, is he good, and cerebral — says his team is winning so wonderfully consistently because they can hit, field, run, play all-around defense, hit in the clutch, communicate, think, come from behind, effect double plays, bunt, win on the road, and I guess that’s about it. But, they have to be there today, and there tomorrow.

After years, numb in some sports around here, Joe Maddon is fresh air. Yipes, he even mentioned The David in Florence. He likes wine, novels, good music, talks in complete sentences, and is not boring. Well, he has himself a dandy club that represents us all, and well: the mighty Rays of Tampa Bay. As does Stuart Sternberg, the man behind it all.

And, in baseball, at last, Maddon and Sternberg do it very, very well.

It was not always so.

Ask Frank Morsani.