This is an opinion column.

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The World Series rings are arriving this month, and it’s hard to imagine a piece of jewelry ever meaning more to a team.

In sports, we‘re conditioned to believe that it’s all about winning. It’s not true. I was reminded of that this year with the purest celebration of sports I’ve ever had to honor to witness. Striving for a common goal is only half of the endeavor. The Birmingham-Southern baseball team showed us that simply being together in this journey through life is the part that enriches the soul.

What can a ring represent? Anything at all, really. A contract, status and rank, memories, love, a promise: tokens and totems that remind us of who we are. For the Los Angeles Dodgers, World Series rings will represent a great struggle and four victories in October. For the Birmingham-Southern baseball team, rings commemorating their journey to the 2024 Division III World Series will stand for that time when a proud college went down swinging.

It’s now the first day of November. We’re rounding third and heading for home with this calendar year. Time rolls ever on, but there is always the promise of next season. Eternal hope is the essence of sports. That’s the binding contract between fans and their teams, too. Next year might just be our time, we all say.

Not for Birmingham-Southern College, though.

BSC closed its doors forever on May 31. It’s a sad story and people will remain bitter about how it happened for a long time. The small liberal arts college ran into financial trouble and couldn’t climb out.

But something remarkable happened in the final hours of the 168-year-old school. Improbably, the scrappy, never-say-die baseball team advanced to the D-III World Series, and then won a game with a walk-off homer on the very same day that Birmingham-Southern College went dark.

What can a ring represent? For the Birmingham-Southern College baseball team, their rings will be trophies of a collective spirit and memorials, too.

Has anything in sports ever mattered more?

I had a chance recently to sneak a peek at the World Series rings designed for the Birmingham-Southern baseball team. They’re as bittersweet as you’d imagine. Like everything about that team, the story behind the rings is a testament to the leadership of coach Jan Weisberg.

Weisberg is the definition of what every coach should strive to be. He put his players above everything. Every decision he made during the final month of his time at Birmingham-Southern was about putting his team in the best position to somehow win games while the school it represented was fading into a shadow.

Weisberg was a resilient portrait of strength when he was on the field and in the clubhouse, but behind the scenes he struggled with the emotions of coaching a team fated for the end. He’s now the head coach at Valdosta State, but he will always be tied to the legacy of Birmingham-Southern.

I ran into Weisberg back in June. It was at Rickwood Field for the game between the San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals. He was with his two sons. We spoke briefly and I could tell he still hadn’t fully recovered from the experience of coaching Birmingham-Southern through its final days. A ring can symbolize courage, too.

There’s always next season. That’s what we say in sports. For Birmingham-Southern, for a few weeks in the spring of 2024, a team played for keeps and they played for everyone who had ever loved a school. More than anything, though, it was a team that played for the joy of living in the present.

What do you do when there’s no tomorrow? You swing for the fence.

How did a school going broke pay for World Series rings? It wasn’t the school at all. It was every fan, alumnus and well-wisher who gave donations to the team during their Homeric postseason quest. A GoFundMe account imagined by assistant coach JD Hulse and set up by athletics director Kyndall Waters raised $120,000.

The rings worn by the final Birmingham-Southern baseball team will represent a powerful idea. Embracing our own mortality is what makes us bravely human.

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Joseph Goodman is the lead sports columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of the book “We Want Bama: A Season of Hope and the Making of Nick Saban’s Ultimate Team.”