Trust me, the book business is extremely tough these days. So it’s difficult to imagine publishers getting excited for a proposal about a small-town high school baseball team from central Illinois in the 1970s.

Yeah, we haven’t had a good high school baseball book in a long time.

But that’s what exactly happened for Chris Ballard’s One Shot at Forever: A Small Town, An Unlikely Coach, and A Magical Baseball Season. The book tells the story of the Macon (Ill.) baseball team’s bid to win the state title against the big-city teams from Chicago led by its beatnik coach Lynn Sweet.

Actually, it hardly was a surprise that publishers (Hyperion in this case) wanted the book. When Ballard wrote about the team in a 10,000-word story for Sports Illustrated, the response was huge. Boom, built-in audience. The next step was to expand the magazine article into a book.

In the capable hands of Ballard, One Shot gets to the heart of what high school sports means to a small town and the lasting impact the games had on those boys more four decades later. Never thought I would get into a book about high school baseball, but I did.

Here’s my Q/A with Ballard:

Given the subject, how unlikely was it for this book to get published?

The battle I originally fought was with the magazine. When I came to them with the initial idea, one editor said, ‘Just start working on it, but it’s going to be a hard sell.’ Even after I wrote it, it sat around the system for a long time before it finally ran. Once it got into the magazine, the reaction was so positive, and the magazine received more letters than it had for a story in a long time. From there, it wasn’t that difficult to get into the book phase.

How did you find out about the story?

An e-mail came into the office from a guy named Chris Collins. He grew up in Macon and was 10-years-old at the time. He wrote a screenplay about the team and wanted to make it into a movie. He hoped if somebody wrote about it, it would be intriguing enough to generate some interest.

What made the story work for you?

When I met Sweet, I knew it could work. (The book) needed a protagonist, and he was that was that guy. There was the counter culture clash. It was pretty pronounced. He had this charisma of not giving a damn while really caring about the kids. That was an easy combination to root for.

What does this book say about the grip of high school sports that lasts a lifetime?

Had they won, it wouldn’t have been all that interesting. They would have been just another underdog team that won. Instead, it was the ability to look back 40 years later and see the power of sports memories from when you go from boy to man. A lot of people can relate to that.

What was the reaction from the Macon players when they learned you wanted to do a book on their team?

It went from being very excited to being very reticent. (For the star player), it was the one thing he couldn’t let go.

I was at a function with the team. There were 350 people, and they gave them a standing ovation. They saw how people responded to them. The guys were laughing and crying. After that, the players understood what that season meant. It reaffirmed that something happened that mattered.