Reflecting on a win at the Giants’ opener

Walking back to the office after the Giants’ home opener on Monday, April 10, I waited for a light to change at the corner of Fifth and Bryant. A woman who’d perhaps crossed from the shelter on its southeast corner glanced at my orange skirt and — despite my not having played shortstop — asked, “Did you win?”

Maybe that’s the essence of professional sports. When your team’s winning, you feel as as if you personally slid across home plate for a run. And that was the joy of the leadoff home game, an event marred only by the sound of the crack of the pitch that hit

Buster Posey’s helmet. Some glimpses: The national anthem sung by cast members from “Hamilton”; Mayor Ed Lee ,in understated gray Giants cap (“It goes with my gray suit. All civil servants wear gray suits”), eating a hot dog and talking with a constituent about the Great Bay Area Scourge of 2017 — potholes; Giants insiders identifiable by the somber buttons they wore in tribute to Katy Feeney, daughter of Chub Feeney and one of the first women in Major League Baseball administration, who died early this month.

As to the heads of the home-team household, Pam Baer sported a new Tiffany-made bracelet with a World Series ring motif that includes the initials of her kids next to the sparkly Giants “SF” in its center. And visiting our box around the sixth inning, Larry Baer said he’d given Bruce Bochy a signal (I’m not telling what) to aim to end the game between 4:15 and 4:30 p.m. And so it came to pass (4:20 p.m. or so), giving Baer plenty of time to finish his workday and, in keeping with another form of worship, get home before nightfall for a Passover seder. As the song says, “Dayenu,” which means “it would have been enough” ... and we won, too.

At Safeway at 30th and Mission on Monday, Mark Mackler was buying some last-minute matzohs when the woman in line behind him glanced at his purchases and noted, “Oh, it must be Yom Kippur.”

Sitting around and talking about the meaning of Passover after a seder attended by 8-year-old Lily, some grownup asked her to recite one of the Ten Commandments. She hesitated for a bit and then ventured: “Thou shalt not text and drive?”

Food Runners, founded three decades ago by Mary Risley, celebrated its 30th birthday the other night with a dinner at the Ritz-Carlton. This wasn’t a fundraiser; there were only a few speeches and no auction of luxury packages. It was a just plain party to thank Risley, and more than that, to thank the volunteers who nowadays collect, package and deliver prepared food — 17 tons a week — to people who need it.

Risley was presiding over a cooking school in a North Beach storefront when she started, picking up food left over at restaurants, supplementing the Food Bank by distributing prepared foods. Soon after she started, an inspector from the health department turned up. That person, sitting at dinner, became a longtime volunteer and supporter. Nowadays, “We will pick up food from anybody,” said Risley, including tech companies with elaborate food operations for employees.

Risley isn’t one to call attention to herself. Her idea of dressing suitably for an occasion in which she would be in the spotlight wasn’t to wear an evening dress: She wore a hat with plastic fruits and vegetables piled on top. Boxes and packages of food on dispatcher Nancy Hahn’s hat illustrated stage two of the Food Runners’ process.“This isn’t about me,” said Risley, looking around the room. “This is about you ... people who send money, and people who collect food from their companies and package and donate it every day.”

Emcee Liam Mayclem asked all volunteers to stand up, then winnowed down that group by specifying lengths of service. He was left with several who had been volunteering for 30 years. “Don’t let anybody throw good food away in San Francisco,” said Risley, in a tone of voice your mother might have used: definite, demanding and quite right, too.

United Airlines’ new theme song, suggested by Janice Hough: “Rhapsody in Black and Blue.”

PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “In a world of global warming, San Francisco is the place to be.” Woman walking into AT&T Park on a cool spring day, overheard by Debbie Ford-Scriba