Last week someone left a copy of the StarTribune on the lunch table at work. It was still in the plastic bag that papers are delivered in these days.

Over lunch, I took the sports page to my desk and read it. Cover to cover. Spending the most time on the page with the box scores from the previous day’s games and a column/feature called Today in Baseball.

Here is the funny thing about this. I have an online subscription to the StarTribune. I also have a subscription to The Athletic and to Fangraphs and every day I spend time on MLB.com and ESPN.com. So I can get all the baseball news and boxscores I could ever want, but here I was spending 30 minutes reading something that was easily available to me online.

Thinking about the irony of what I had just done, I sent a quick text to my friend Bob because I thought I remembered that he got the daily physical StarTribune delivered to him. I asked him about it.

His response to me, since he knew I was a devoted Kindle user was:

We get the physical version. As an old paper boy, it’s hard to give that up.  Plus I prefer reading hard copy.  I’m not sure you’re missing any coverage and you seem comfortable reading digital.  Might as well save a tree.

I spent the afternoon thinking more about it. When I got home that night, I told Sue about how much I enjoyed reading a physical sports page again and that I was thinking I wanted to change my digital subscription to an analog one. So I did just that.

Starting this past Monday, we started getting the analog StarTribune delivered. Here is a picture of the sports page from that first delivered edition.

On the front page, an article about Pablo Lopez’s 14-strikeout outing against the A’s on Sunday afternoon, a column by local sports columnist Jim Souhan on gymnast Simone Biles, and this being Minnesota a story about the Plante hockey family and University of Minnesota Golden Gopher player Cam Christie. The exact same stories that I could find in the online edition of the StarTribune. But with the physical paper in my hand, I actually read all four articles, or at least most of the article. Something I would never have done unless I was holding the paper in my hand.

While I am a fan of my Kindle and of ebooks in general, there are certain things I have found to be less satisfying in a digital format. The first is poetry. I read a lot of poetry. But I am unable to enjoy the experience of reading poetry digitally. I like to hold the volume in one hand and a pencil in the other. It is the only way that truly works well for me.

Boxscores are apparently the same way for me. There is something so deeply satisfying about studying and meditating on a page of daily boxscores. I am going to try adding a pencil to that process going forward. Something that I used to do regularly riding the el in Chicago or the bus in Minneapolis-St. Paul or just sitting at the breakfast table in the “old days.”

Boxscores, sports pages, and poetry. Things that are meant to be taken in a slow, meditative way. Things that are only truly savored as separate rituals above and apart from our hectic, 24-hour, digital age.

And if this wasn’t reason enough to get the daily paper. Take a look at this picture. Here is something a digital sports pages cannot provide. A place to sit.