Magnum: [narrating] I've always loved baseball. I think it has more of the American character than any other sport. It's competitive without being cutthroat. It's basically simple, but capable of incredible complexity. Baseball is played in parks. It has no clock except for the eternal rhythm of each individual game. This gives it thrilling bursts of action and moments of leisurely tranquility. All-in-all, I'm convinced that baseball represents one of man's noblest endeavors.

Magnum: [narrating] I've always loved John O'Hara's story of the servant who saw death coming towards him in a Baghdad marketplace. So he fled to Samarra only to learn that it was there that death had an appointment with him. Laura felt I had an appointment in Samarra. I had to find out if she was right.

Magnum: [narrating] If any place looked like it should be haunted, it was the old Clifford Estate. The overgrowth and the cobwebs were all legit. Not that I was scared; but I did make a point of going in the daytime.

Magnum: [narrating] If I believed in ghosts, I'm sure I'd be frightened by now, but, since I didn't, the pounding in my chest must have been due to exertion.

Magnum: [narrating] If this had been a regular hire, I would have told "Ms." Chase where to stick her toe shoe, but, since it came through Robin, I had to take a deep breath, count to ten, and remember my blessings.

Magnum: [narrating] In my dad's day it was pool halls. Me? I sometimes hung out in pinball arcades. And these days a lot of kids lose themselves in computer explosions of lights and sounds. But whatever your game, you could always count on one thing in places like these; you could, in the space of a couple of hours, temporarily escape the problems of the outside world.

Magnum: [narrating] In that Army�Navy game, where I went 21-30, one of the passes I missed was intercepted. The fastest man on the Army team caught it, and he got past everybody, until I was the only guy left who had a chance to catch him. The guy was faster than me, and I knew it, but I wasn't going to get beat by my own mistake.

Magnum: [narrating] It's kind of funny how the years can sometimes creep by on you, two or three at a time, and nothing much changes. You're in a routine, and all that you really get is a little older, until whammo! -- you get a big three hundred and sixty-five that sometimes sets you right on your ear, changes everything. I guess 1979 was that kind of year for me. I resigned from the Navy, and I became a private investigator. Of course, that's a big over-simplification. Actually, there was a little more to it than that. There was Karen Teal, for example. The best woman surfer of 1979, and '8, and '7, and '6. Karen was the best. She always won, no matter who she went up against, and I really think it was that way because her love for life brought out the best in her. I know that because a long time ago, Karen Teal brought out the best in me. It seemed like only yesterday.

Magnum: [narrating] Kate had been a wire service reporter working out of Saigon, when she came to do a story on our team. She was an idealist; not naive, but still an idealist. She wanted to write the truth. And if a truth happened to be location in a free-fire zone, or if the truth wasn't exactly what she thought it would be going in, well she'd write it anyway. That's the Kate we all fell for. And when she got wounded, it was a buddy getting hit.

Magnum: [narrating] Life on the islands has an irresistible rhythm; Days merging together like waves on the beach, that's why I never understood why people get excited over artificial events. For example, a birthday should be a private time, with maybe a run on the beach to celebrate, not the big, embarrassing fuss a person's friends always make over it. I should know because it was my birthday, and I knew Rick and T.C. would be planning something special. What I didn't know was that the day would be one of the biggest disasters of my life.

Magnum: [narrating] Living alone has some terrific advantages, you can eat, sleep, go in and out, and burp whenever you want. It also has one terrific disadvantage � when you lose something, you've got no one to blame but yourself.

Magnum: [narrating] Ms. Wagner, my 11th grade English teacher, created a scandal in my hometown when she put All the King's Men on our mandatory reading list. She said she wanted us to understand the fatal attraction some men have for the very thing that will destroy them. Her love for the book got her fired and I never quite understood the attraction she was talking about, until the first day I saw Alex Carter and the way T.C. was looking at her.

Magnum: [narrating] My Aunt Phoebe was the smartest woman I ever knew. She also had a tendency to see things bigger than life, which meant that when you were with her you got to see more vibrant colors, hear more intriging sounds, feel things more fully than when she was gone. But, it also meant that sometimes you had to translate her view of the world into a more mundane reality.

Magnum: [narrating] My dad once told me that life is a trick done with mirrors. You look at something from one direction, it looks like one thing; you turn it over, it looks like something else. I guess he was right. Sometimes it's hard to tell who's a real friend, and who's just an illusion in glass.

Magnum: [narrating] My grandfather was one of the world's great collectors. He collected souvenirs, stamps, and friends, but his prized collection was a stack of uncirculated currency: all silver certificates, all two-dollar bills. On my 13th birthday, he gave me one of them and told me to read the serial number. It was my birth date, and in time it became my "Lucky Two". I'd carried it with me ever since... until last night.