More than anything, Irtiza Hasan wants to see his team play in the World Series. After years of heartbreak and waiting, he finally has his chance.

But now he can’t risk it.

Hasan, 38, is a senior human resources manager in Houston. His father has been taking him to see the Astros play since he was 9 years old. He and his father didn’t always see eye-to-eye when he was growing up, but they had sports and those baseball games. Now, Hasan’s wife and their kids join him and his father when they can.

It’s that kind of love of a team -- built on family relationships and memories -- that is familiar to fans everywhere.

While baseball is a famously superstitious sport, Hasan never considered himself superstitious. That is, until he did the math this post-season. The Astros were a hot, 101-win team in the regular season, but in the games he had attended at Minute Maid Park, they were 9-7, barely above .500. So when it came down to the do-or-die sixth game of the American League Championship Series, Hasan realized a great sacrifice was needed.

He put on his Astros socks and jersey and disconnected from the world. He told his father he was welcome to take his grandsons to their regular seats behind home plate, but he wouldn’t be joining them. He turned off his phone, refused to read or watch the news or even talk to his friends, who were bound to discuss the game. He wanted to distance his beloved team from any whiff of the jinx he could be carrying.

“This was incredibly hard for me,” he said.

His mother told him that whether the Astros won or lost was up to God.

“Yup,” he agreed. “And God wants me to stay away.”

The night of that decisive game, he prayed fervently, took an Ambien and went to bed. He could tell from the looks on his sons’ faces the next morning that there was going to be a game 7.

Hasan kept his unused game tickets in his pocket, and told his boys to bring home a win. His father was ticked that his son’s ticket was going to waste.

Hasan’s wife jokes that he became an exceptionally devoted husband during this brief baseball hiatus. They were at a restaurant for a dinner party when a friend approached him and said, “Congratulations, bro, your team is going to the World Series.”

Hasan let out an unrestrained scream and hugged his daughter. He says his eyes may have filled with tears. When he turned on his phone, he saw he had 1,100 unread messages in WhatsApp from his friends and more than 100 texts.

Later that night, he watched a replay of the win on YouTube. He has no regrets that his father and sons went to the game without him. Each night, he keeps his unused ticket in his pocket.

“I wanted to feel like I was there,” he said. “It’s weird. Makes no sense,” he admits.

Of course it’s irrational, the way we wish we could affect things that we have no control over.

But maybe there’s also a special thing about fathers and baseball magic. My own dad has always been a huge sports fan. But he worked too many hours when we were growing up to actually go watch a baseball game. Plus, tickets for a family of six kids would have cost a small fortune, even at the Astrodome. I was shocked when I found out recently he had never made it to a game.

I took my 74-year-old dad to his first baseball game this summer in Houston. I bought my first non-Cardinals T-shirt for that game, where my dad was surrounded by his kids and grandkids.

The Astros lost that night, but it still felt like baseball magic in the air.

Just like Hasan believes his playoff game sacrifice paid off, I’m convinced my dad and I helped charm this season for the ‘Stros, too.

Hasan didn’t watch the first game of the series, when Houston lost. He says he’s making the decision one game at a time. Since I’ve experienced the thrill of World Series wins in St. Louis, I felt his self-denial into this final stretch was too extreme.

If it goes to game 7, I feel like you have to watch it, I said to him.

“Sheesh,” he said, a little exasperated that I would say something so jinxy. “Let’s get there.”

The last time I visited my parents’ home, my father kindly suggested that I consider taking back my childhood junk that had been sitting in their garage for more than two decades.

In fact, he had done me the great favor of sorting through a half-dozen boxes of sentimental scraps, pulling together the stuff he deemed most worthy of saving into two sturdy Home Depot boxes, and sealing them shut with what appeared to be a significant amount of packing tape.

Never let it be said that I can’t take a hint.

Since we were traveling by plane, I figured it made sense to mail the boxes back from Texas to Missouri. We loaded the boxes, which were filled with papers, books and photos, into the car and headed to the nearest post office. When we hoisted the box on the weight scale, I realized this would a pricey trip down memory lane. I asked the clerk if the boxes could be sent through the cheaper rate of media mail, which I had used before to ship books. It cut my shipping costs by more than half.

When she asked if I wanted to insure the items, I smiled and said no. What kind of value could I put on the complete set of school yearbooks from kindergarten through college? Or personal letters I’d saved from college or journals I’d kept while traveling through Egypt and Turkey when I studied abroad? The value of our life memorabilia doesn’t translate well to dollars.

I left the post office proud of the money I’d saved on this final act of adulting -- no longer using my parents’ garage as a storage facility. I was also more than a little curious about what I’d find when I opened those boxes and sifted through my dad’s collection of my elementary school report cards, artwork and school reports.

You can see where this is headed, can’t you?

Eight days later, an unfamiliar package arrived at my doorstep. It was much smaller than the box I had mailed, but the mailing address from the old box had been cut out and retaped on this one. Inside, there were some of my elementary school and college yearbooks and nothing else, except a letter from the United States Postal Service.

“During the processing of your package, the contents became unsecured and required rewrapping in order to forward it to its destination,” it said. If anything was missing, it suggested I send “an accurate and detailed description of each item” to the Atlanta Mail Recovery Center.

My heart sank. I wasn’t going to see any of that stuff again.

It wasn’t the first time I had lost a stash of cherished mementos. Lightning struck our home when I was in high school, and part of our home caught on fire. Letters I had saved from my grandfather and notes and cards and diaries from grade school and middle school turned to ash.

This time, more than the physical items, I mourned the loss of never knowing how my father had curated those memories, what he had saved for decades in hopes of passing on to me. I dreaded calling him with the news.

“I have some bad news,” I said. He took it worse than I did.

“It’s all your life work ... they threw it away?” he asked, incredulous. “This is unbelievable.”

He told me I needed to write to the postmaster general. Tell him your dad had saved everything from your elementary school drawings to the research you did in college, he said. “Things I felt like were important. ... It was so much stuff. I cannot imagine this.”

I told him not to be so upset. “Tell them you will gladly go into a warehouse in that center in Atlanta,” he told me. He wanted me to dig through whatever was stored there until I recovered my lost papers.

I wasn’t going to go to Atlanta.

Of course, then he started blaming himself.

“I shouldn’t have asked you to take it,” he said.

“It’s going to be all right, Dad. It’s OK,” I said.

“No, it’s not all right, and it’s not OK,” he said.

Sometimes it’s hard for parents to let go of their kids’ memories.

For a week, I kept that stack of surviving yearbooks on the kitchen counter, feeling a pinch in my heart when I thought about things I didn’t even know I would miss, until my husband moved them to the basement.

Two weeks later, Hurricane Harvey hit Texas. I watched my hometown sink under water.

Friends’ homes destroyed. My old high school flooded. Family members evacuated and rescued. Then Irma, Jose and Maria. Puerto Rico, where the vast majority of the residents still lack power and many have resorted to drinking contaminated water to survive.

Then the fires in Northern California. So much destruction, all it once, it seemed.

I kept coming back one of my favorite quotes: “All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on,” Henry Havelock Ellis wrote.

I was glad my husband had moved those old yearbooks.

Letting go.

Holding on.

Today’s middle schools are the training ground for tomorrow’s Harveys and Bills.

While more women and men are publicly speaking out about sexual harassment and assaults, many students don’t realize that what they face in hallways and classrooms often goes beyond bullying.

At least 1 in 4 middle schoolers say they’ve experienced unwanted verbal or physical sexual harassment at school, according to 2014 research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Girls as young as 12 have told me about boys who compare them to porn stars they’ve watched online. The easy access to and widespread consumption of pornography among tweens and teens reinforces warped attitudes of women as little more than sexual objects.

The country, however, has always been more riveted by high-profile cases of sexual abuse involving celebrities than by how to better educate young people about respecting other people’s bodies. The latest reports involve Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who has joined a growing list of powerful men facing accusations of sexual misconduct.

Multiple women allege Bill Cosby raped them. Rape allegations have also surfaced against Weinstein. Fox News employees say Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly abused their positions for years by sexually harassing women there. The highest officeholder in the land has also battled similar allegations. At least 15 women have publicly accused President Donald Trump, who was elected after being caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by their genitals, of sexual harassment and assault.

These men have all denied wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, 27 percent of middle school-aged girls and 25 percent of boys reported that they had experienced verbal or physical sexual harassment or violence, the most common being unwanted touching, according to the study. Middle school counselors talk about trying to deal with rampant sexting among students, and increasingly educate students about the risks of digital sexual experimentation. But rarely are sexual harassment and consent discussed in this context.

Here’s an easy test for parents: Ask your middle schooler if he or she knows the difference between sexual harassment and assault. Find out if it’s part of the health curriculum. If it isn’t, define it for them: Sexual harassment includes unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors and other conduct of a sexual nature that affects a person’s employment or education, interferes with work or educational performance, or creates an environment that a reasonable person would find intimidating, hostile or offensive. Let them know it’s unacceptable.

The way boys treat their classmates now lays the foundation for how they will treat their co-workers later. We’ve seen an avalanche of victims who have shared details of the abuse they’ve suffered. Too often, powerful people have been able to degrade and abuse others because wealth, status and societal attitudes insulate them. Young people take note when these serial offenders don’t appear to suffer real consequences. They hear those who defend sexual predators based on their personal interactions with an individual, rather than the merits of the allegations against them.

I saw this pattern of denial every time a popular coach or religious leader was implicated in a sexual crime. The default response of the community was to take the side of the accused. Many believed that if a predator was good to them or helped them, he was falsely accused.

While we may perceive a difference between a predator who accosts women in the street versus one who attacks them in a well-appointed office, there is no difference.

Different setting, same character.

The most basic lessons we teach toddlers are the same ones we to need to hold them accountable to as they grow up: Be respectful. Keep your hands to yourself. No matter how large or fragile your ego, you don’t have the right to grab anyone.

Not even if you are the smartest kid in the science class, a star athlete or the boy next door.

Not even if you are the most powerful producer in Hollywood or the president of the United States.