<table> </table> CHICAGO | Exactly 40 years have drifted by since the Kansas City Royals played their first major league baseball game. In the first game of those 40 years, a rookie outfielder named Lou Piniella cracked four hits, and the Royals won in the 12th inning when pinch hitter Joe Keough hit a single that scored third baseman Joe Foy.</p><p>On Tuesday, in the last game of those 40 years, a Royals relief pitcher named Kyle Farnsworth allowed a three-run homer in the eighth inning to a slugger named Jim Thome, and the Royals blew a lead and lost on opening day to the Chicago White Sox 4-2.</p><p>Forty years. This hasn&#8217;t been some torrid love affair. It has been a real marriage between Kansas City and the Royals, full of love and exasperation, triumph and despair, better and worse. The Royals played that first game on April 8, 1969, in a ballpark called Municipal Stadium on the corner of 22nd and Brooklyn. The stadium is long gone now, but there&#8217;s a plaque marking the spot, and you still hear stories about home runs that were hit over the street and people who would stand outside and offer to watch your car for a dollar.</p><p>The Royals were good almost immediately. That was the shocking thing. Kansas City had grown used to the clowning lunacy of the Kansas City Athletics, who not only had a losing record every single year before moving to Oakland, but lost with style as well. The owner, Charlie Finley, would sometimes send a mule to the press box so the writers could smell what they were writing. Outfielder Roger Repoz once lost a fly ball in the moon. The A&#8217;s once gave up 11 runs on one hit. And so on.</p><p>So it was jolting for Kansas City fans to see an organization like the Royals, a team that made excellent trades and drafted good players and played together. In the Royals&#8217; third year of existence, they won more than they lost and finished in second place. In their eighth year, they won the American League West. They won it again the next year. And the next year. And two years after that, they played in their first World Series.</p><p>The Royals represented so much of what Kansas City wanted to believe about itself. They were a family. They were creative. They were tough. And they were part of the community &#8230; you could go out to the Plaza after a game, and there would be star third baseman George Brett or big first baseman John Mayberry or pitcher Dennis Leonard. You could buy a player a drink, and he would probably walk over and talk about the game. Frank White, who grew up in Kansas City and worked on the construction crew that built the new Royals Stadium (now the even newer Kauffman Stadium), played second base like no one had ever played it before.</p><p>Willie Wilson, perhaps the fastest man to ever play major league baseball, would hit balls that skidded off the artificial turf, and he would be a wonder to watch run around the bases. Hal McRae, who believed that you played baseball to win, would slide hard to break up double plays. Relief pitcher Dan Quisenberry would throw strike after strike after strike, counting on his brilliant defense to make the great plays behind him. And more often than not, it did.</p><p>Kansas City could not get enough of that team. From 1976 to 1993, the Royals, playing in perhaps the smallest market in baseball, averaged more than 2 million fans per season.</p><p>Then, two things happened.</p><p>1. The players went on strike just as the Royals were playing great baseball, and the World Series was canceled.</p><p>2. Owner Ewing Kauffman died.</p><p>The second of those left a terrible void. Kauffman, in many ways, was the Kansas City Royals. He was the man who stepped forward to bring the Royals to town. He was the driving force behind the Royals Baseball Academy, a bold effort to find talented athletes and teach them how to play baseball. Frank White came out of the academy, and so did 13 other players who reached the major leagues (including current Texas manager Ron Washington). He came up with the Royals Lancers concept, in which he asked people in the business community to sell tickets. He also put in a complicated succession plan that all but guaranteed that the Royals would stay in Kansas City.