Windows Don't Reopen
In 2010, Portland's last professional baseball game looked like an intermission. Fifteen years later, the team is gone and the window never reopened. Delivery depends on recognizing when capability, mandate, and trust align—and acting before the pieces scatter.
On a September evening in 2010, the Portland Beavers played their final game at PGE Park. After the last out, the groundskeeper dug up home plate and handed it to a group called Friends of Baseball, who promised to guard it until professional baseball returned to Portland. Kids ran the bases. Fans stayed to watch. Everyone treated it like an intermission.
Fifteen years later, Portland still has no professional baseball team. The stadium where the Beavers played is now Providence Park, a soccer-specific facility. The team was sold and relocated. The civic groups that fought for baseball dissolved or moved on. The owner who might have built a new ballpark spent his money on bringing Major League Soccer to town instead.
What looked like a temporary setback was actually a permanent dispersal. All the pieces that made baseball possible in Portland scattered in different directions, and they haven't come back together since.
The lesson has little to do with baseball. It reveals how alignment appears and disappears. How people, ideas, and resources can line up perfectly, and how quickly that constellation dissolves when action slows. Moments of alignment create openings that rarely return in the same shape.
Recognizing the Window
Anyone who builds public systems sees the same rhythm. A coalition forms around a goal. A project gains support, funding, and visibility. People who understand each other's languages find temporary harmony. Then the moment shifts. Leaders move on. Budgets change. The chemistry fades.
The next version looks similar but feels different because the relationships and trust that made it work have dispersed.
Delivery depends on seeing these moments for what they are: temporary alignments of energy, people, and conditions. The skill lies in acting while the pieces still fit together. Wait too long, and you start again from zero.
Alignment happens when three elements intersect:
Capability is the group of people who know how to deliver.
Mandate is the political and institutional space that allows them to move.
Trust is what gives them cover to make real decisions.
When these elements align, delivery becomes possible. As they drift apart, systems fall still. Every successful project begins with alignment and ends when it fades.
What Disperses
A roster is more than a list of names. It's the network of relationships that makes delivery possible. When a roster disperses, knowledge travels with it. Every team that has shipped something meaningful carried a shared rhythm, a memory of what worked, and a pattern of cooperation that cannot be cloned by hiring replacements.
True capacity lives in people who have built before. They sense when the window opens. They build trust quickly, deliver before politics shift, and document what matters so the next team can keep moving.
Building public capacity means investing in rosters that can re-form. It means teaching people how to see windows opening and giving them permission to act while conditions hold.
Delivering is the job
A delivery leader's job is to sense timing. When capability, mandate, and trust align, the task is to move. That can mean securing funding, launching a service, or formalizing a partnership while conditions allow. Action sustains alignment. Hesitation drains it.
The idea of next year gives comfort but dulls urgency. The next window will have different players and constraints. The conditions that made something possible today will never repeat exactly. Momentum fades fast.
I recall the story of the Portland Beavers often because it reminds me how missed opportunities disappear without anyone tracking them. We blame people who "should've supported the team when it was here," but being close to problems means losing sight of the full landscape. We postpone tomorrow what we could solve today.
The Cost of Missing the Moment
The worst part of failing to meet the moment is that people leave and no one is held to account. Robert Moses spent decades reshaping American cities according to his vision, imposing his will on millions. The Attorney General whose legal interpretation enabled government shutdowns lived in retirement, claiming he never intended his work to be used politically. The preservationists who killed the AAA stadium proposal in Portland still celebrate Memorial Coliseum's mid-century grandeur. They weren't thinking about the city's viability or what a modern civic asset could do. Many of them have moved on or died.
The conditions that make progress possible live only for a while, yet the consequences of missing them endure for years.
Building Capacity That Endures
Preparing for the next window means strengthening delivery ecosystems through practice and continuity. This means creating roles for learning and rotation. Preserving knowledge through documentation and mentorship. Protecting delivery teams from whiplash.
Successful delivery happens when people align around common definitions of problems. These days, we spend too much time debating reasons and merits instead of acting while conditions hold.
Alignment is a privilege. Acting within it is the work.
Windows close quietly. The next one will look different. The builders who will seize it are learning somewhere today, if we create the capacity for them to learn.