Two more steps on a long journey.

Connecticut's DiJonai Carrington (21) drives to the hoop at TD Garden.

I have a new TV. Its picture is 10 inches bigger diagonally than the old one's was and it does a lot of things, only a fraction of which I've learned how to do. I think it can project two stations on the screen at the same time, but I don't have the patience to find out.

So there I was sitting before the big TV on Tuesday night, also employing my eight-year-old iPad to view a second station simultaneously -- and I am not at all ashamed to admit that I spent most of the evening with tears in my eyes.

On the big screen was the Democratic National Convention, a celebration of hope, optimism and inclusion that has been a refreshing contrast to the doom-and-gloom tone of its Republican counterpart about a month ago. On Tuesday, there were great speeches by former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama, and one of the most unique roll call votes in convention history to confirm Vice President Kamala Harris as the second woman to be nominated for the presidency and the first of Black and Asian descent to be a party's standard-bearer.

And on the smaller screen was a basketball game at the TD Garden in Boston, a first for that iconic arena -- the WBNA's Connecticut Sun playing host to the Los Angeles Sparks in the first game from that league to be played in Boston. The game drew a sellout crowd of 19,125, and it was rewarded with a come-from-behind, 69-61 win by the Sun over Los Angeles. The crowd was raucous, involved, enthusiastic and it even employed the classic "Beat L.A.!!" chants borrowed from the great Celtics-Lakers rivalry games of the past.

And I cried. Like a baby. 

Kamala Harris accepts the nomination.

On my screens were two events of great importance, one national and international in scope and the other long overdue in a city that touts itself as a bastion of liberalism but has not welcomed the WNBA into its city limits in the three decades of its existence. And since it's well known that I devoted almost 70 percent of my life doing as much as I could to promote women's equality in sports in this little corner of the world, I did feel at least a little invested in what happened on the basketball court and in the stands at the Garden.

And as for the nomination of Vice President Harris, I've always been one to support candidates of merit regardless of race, gender, party, sexual orientation or whatever. Despite my liberal leanings, I am not a registered Democrat. I'm what we in Massachusetts call "unenrolled." I have voted in 13 Presidential elections, choosing 11 Democrats and two Republicans. I've been a winner eight times and a loser five times. America has survived through all of them.

I was a proud voter for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and I will not play coy with my 2024 choice. I will be voting for Harris and her VP nominee, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. I think the Democrats need to yank any semblance of control over the government from the despicable MAGA movement, which embraces racism, misogyny and xenophobia to support the notion of its leader of what a "great" America is. I am pleased with the direction in which Harris would take America because I believe liberalism equals compassion and progress as opposed to the constant refrain of hatred, grievances and retribution from the disaster that the Republican Party has become. 

In fact, I believe that anybody that identifies as Republican but does not support the extremism of Trump and his Nazi-like minions should be fully ashamed of themselves for not taking stronger stands against Trumpism. They are just as complicit in Trump's rise to power as anyone that marched in Charlottesville, Va., holding tiki torches and chanting Nazi tropes.

Donald Trump destroyed the USFL.

Harsh? Maybe. But I'm not the one that has to look in the mirror. I've despised Donald Trump since the 1980s, when he seized control of the United States Football League and promptly destroyed it because he couldn't mastermind a merger with the established NFL. I did not cheat on three successive wives, the latter a mail-order escort from Slovenia that was fraudulently given American citizenship and was not spared her own embarrassment when her husband had a well-publicized sexual tryst with an actress in pornographic films. I'm not the one that was found guilty of 34 felony counts in connection with covering up hush-money payments to that porn actress. I'm not the one that paid off several families under accusations of molesting underaged children. I never flew with Jeffrey Epstein to his "pleasure island" in the Caribbean. I never instigated an insurrection against the rightful United States government.

Should I go on? If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

So I watched the DNC every night -- choosing the C-SPAN telecasts instead of legacy media so I could watch without the coloring influence of analysis. That was refreshing. I even passed on the love of my media life, CBS Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell, to not shade my opinion of the proceedings in either direction.

I'm sure some conservatives would say I was suckered into embracing the liberal line. Indeed, I've been waging that war on social media against people that absolutely cannot understand the differences and the veracity of what they see and hear from the two parties. But aside from the fact that the Democrats used complete sentences and did not invoke the example of a fictional serial killer to make a point, the messaging was so different, and so hopeful, that I could not help but be swayed.

Yes, there were excesses of "joy." The DNC often came off as a four-night variety special, and that musical roll call of the delegates was a shock at first. The issue was already settled because Kamala Harris had secured the needed number of delegates in a virtual roll call, but it grew on me after a while. After all, everyone was having fun -- and after having watched a Republican convention in which I was told that America is a shithole country that's going down the toilet and the only man that can save it is a silver-spoon-fed geriatric that has sucked on the teat of inherited wealth all his life and is about to be sentenced on those aforementioned felony convictions, well, I had my fill of negativity for the remainder of my life.

What was most striking about the DNC was the full commitment the party has made to ensure women's reproductive rights. I was touched to my very core by the stories of women who could not receive emergency care during failed pregnancies because the states in which they lived took the opportunity to pass harsh and draconian laws restricting abortion and related healthcare in the wake of the devastating reversal of Roe v. Wade by Donald Trump's conservative-stacked Supreme Court.

I have always applied one standard for forming opinions about issues such as abortion and LBGTQ+ rights, even though as a 70-year-old white heterosexual male, I can't really experience any of these issues first-hand. My reasoning is always to attempt to walk a mile in their shoes -- to try to determine how I would feel if I was experiencing the hate and discrimination felt by others.

The MAGA view of a "great" America.

I grew up in an era when the Southern states still openly discriminated against Blacks. My mother was from the central Florida hamlet of Williston, which our family visited annually in the 1950s and 1960s to see her aging parents. I don't believe my mother was a racist -- she certainly didn't raise me to be one -- but by the time I was 8 years old and able to understand the ways of the world, I knew that her hometown was definitely hostile to its African-American residents. I saw first-hand the "colored only" water coolers and entrances to public buildings, and even as a pre-teen, I knew enough to form my opinion by inserting myself into that plight. 

Now, more than 60 years later, I hear a former President talking about making America great again, and knowing that he means bringing the country back to a 19th-century mindset where people of color and all women were marginalized and subservient to white males, and it makes me sick to my stomach.

I am a fan of empowerment, especially of women. Practically every woman with whom I have had close relationships in my adult life have been smart, independent and motivated to make the most of the equality that was promised them -- if not entirely realized -- by the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s. And most of them have been disappointed time after time by men that have denied then equal pay, equal opportunities, and equal rights to control their own bodies.

I vowed a long time ago to not be one of those men.

Jackie Cross, left, plays in a girls-boys
exhibition game in February 1971.

I've told the story before of how my high school sweetheart was the starting center of the Mansfield High girls' basketball team. She was 5-foot-11 and a very good athlete, and probably would have been even better if she had been able to benefit from the post-Title IX improvements in coaching and training methods that followed just a few years later. I was a part-time writer for the town's weekly newspaper and I covered all of the boys' sports, and one day, as Jackie and I were shooting some baskets, she asked me why I never covered any of her games.

I could have answered with the truth, that her games were in the afternoons at the opposite site of the boys, and I had to hitch rides on the team bus to cover the boys and thus fulfill the demands of the newspaper's editor. But I didn't.

Instead, I said, "It's only girls' basketball."

Big mistake. And to this day, I have not forgotten the look on her face. I had just marginalized the person that supposedly meant the most to me on this earth, and it was indicative of a complete lack of understanding and respect of something incredibly important to her. Not surprisingly, our relationship did not last beyond another two years.

She died of breast cancer in 1986, leaving behind a husband and four children. 

Meanwhile, in my first years at The Sun Chronicle, I carried on a flawed policy of cursory coverage of girls' sports before a pair of local coaches, Oliver Ames' Laney Clement-Holbrook and Seekonk's Dorene Menezes, cornered me in separate phone calls to tear me a new asshole over what they believed to be intentionally dismissive coverage of girls' sports. And at some point, their emotions transcended their words, and those emotions forced me to look at the situation from the viewpoint of someone being discriminated against, and not as a beneficiary of male privilege.

It took some convincing, but Peter Gobis and I embarked upon a quest to equalize the coverage of boys' and girls' high school sports. It was basically doubling our workload, as well as the space we commanded in the daily newspaper, but for many of my years at the paper, it was beneficial to us to have opened the pages of The Sun Chronicle's sports section to another 51 percent of the readership.

We caught holy hell at first. Some knuckle-dragging male readers thought we were taking something away from the boys' teams, when we were actually adding new content. I took the point in covering the girls' teams, and I got called every name in the book for it -- a pedophile, a stalker, a child molester, you name it -- just because I covered girls' teams and gave them my best effort. Oh, I also covered pro football, the manliest of manly sports, for 42 years. That didn't wash with the thick-skulled male chauvinists -- until they had daughters, and not sons, and were suddenly all-in on our policy of inclusion.

No, I didn't teach Sarah Behn my basketball skills.

I don't regret a thing. It was the most meaningful thing I've ever done in my life. I didn't have the opportunity to cure cancer or accomplish anything truly memorable, but I can say that at a time when women athletes were begging for respect and opportunities, they found an ally in me. 

I watched that game at the TD Garden knowing that I had nothing to do with its success. But I'm glad I lived long enough to see something like this happen in a city where it should have happened a very long time ago. It has been a personal goal to be able to see that level of acceptance of women's sports and to be able to stick in the faces of the morons that mocked me and the wonderful athletes I covered.

Unfortunately, they're not gone yet. One look at the reader comments under the Boston Globe's coverage of the Sun-Sparks game drove that point home. Ignorance is not in short supply in today's America. If it was, Donald Trump would have been cast upon the scrap heap of history long before he ever became President.

But it's another step forward.

I've said all along during this election cycle that women will be the salvation of the nation. Angry at the vacating of Roe v. Wade, they can turn the tide and erase the effectiveness of Trump's redneck base for that reason alone. And regardless of what you may feel about the process that took President Biden off the ballot, the Democrats put a talented and feisty female prosecutor in his place to seize the moment. Trump has no idea in the world how to run against Kamala Harris, so he resorts to his usual despicable and childish tropes -- mispronouncing her name intentionally, blaming her for everything wrong in the country, and of late, even re-tweeting scurrilous memes that purport her to be a transgender male.

If there is a God, Donald J. Trump will be burning in a particularly torturous corner of hell for all eternity. But since that can't be guaranteed here in the land of the living, the best we can do is throw him in jail when he is sentenced for his felony convictions in early September, and then throw him out of public life at the ballot box in November.

Oh, and Taylor Swift, if you're paying attention -- a few well-chosen words from you will also help. A lot.

Mark Farinella is still awaiting delivery of his Harris/Walz bumper stickers. Comment on his opinions at theownersbox2020@gmail.com.