Sometimes it’s difficult, even impossible, to see cause and effect in things and I suppose it may be meaningless as well. Since Doc Brown’s DeLorean did get destroyed, we can’t go back in time, and what’s left is just a game of second-guessing.

The other day, I made a short trip to Finland on Finnair. I always check out the in-flight magazine out of professional curiosity and courtesy and this time, what caught my eye was a column about Finnish architecture.

Eliel Saarinen’s son, Eero, designed the Arch in St. Louis (the Jefferson monument), one of the most famous buildings in the United States. I remember visiting it at the tender age of 13. It left a lasting impression on me, a bit like the Atomium in Brussels, or the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

Now, I wasn’t on that trip to St. Louis, but I remember it just as well because the goalie of the columnist’s hockey team was a schoolmate of mine and he came back to school wearing the coolest hat I had ever seen in my life.

A St. Louis Blues baseball hat.

To this day, when I think of cool, I think of that goalie and his hat.

I was so inspired and impressed that when I a few weeks later saw a small ad in the paper about baseball hats – “GET YOURSELF A REAL BASEBALL HAT” – I somehow managed to talk my mother into ordering one for me by mail.

A few weeks passed. No hat. My friend wore his Blues hat proudly at school, as well as his real American mesh T-shirts. Every day, I’d rush home and skip up the stairs, hoping to see that package waiting for me.

One day, I did. Not the package, but a notification of it from our local post office, just across the street from us. My mom and I picked it up, I opened the box and envisioned my own coolness at school the next day. I reached into the box, and pulled out a completely white baseball hat.

As far as I was concerned, that was no real baseball hat. It was completely white, there were no cool NHL logos and even worse, no mesh in the back. That hat was nothing – except a completely white demolition ball that crushed me. It got buried in the back of a closet and forgotten (but it did make a brief comeback a few years later).

Now. Since then, believe you me, for reasons that can only be second-guessed, I have had a lot of cool hats. Bought many, got some as presents. I made it a habit of mine to always buy the hat of the local hockey team wherever i traveled. In Rouen, France, I walked over ten kilometers to find that one store that carried those black-and-yellow hats.

But I still don’t own a St. Louis Blues hat. Don’t know why.

The columnist who wrote about Finnish architecture was Alexander Stubb whose life took another direction. He’s now Finland’s minister of foreign affairs. Obviously, he didn’t waste any energy on chasing baseball hats.

Then again, he probably bought one in St. Louis.