In “Field of Dreams,” the best film about baseball, my favorite line is not the most famous.

Or even, I suspect, among the handful of scenes most often quoted.

The 1989 movie boasts a wealth of memorable moments, and dialogue.

I suspected “Field of Dreams” would air on at least one channel on my line up in the wake of James Earl Jones’ death on Sept. 9.

It did, on the evening of Sept. 11.

Jones portrayed Terence Mann, the formerly famous writer and 1960s counterculture icon turned recluse.

His soliloquy toward the film’s end might be its most beloved scene.

Kevin Costner’s character, Ray Kinsella, is facing foreclosure and eviction after plowing under a swath of the corn on his Iowa farm so he could build a baseball field at the behest of a ghostly voice that cajoled him with the repeated whisper, “If you build it, he will come.”

Jones, his unique baritone never more resonant, assures Costner that he needn’t sell the farm to the partners who include his soulless brother-in-law, needn’t give up the field to boost his bushel count.

“People will come, Ray,” Jones says, and they will pay an admission fee of $20 per person “without even thinking about it. For it is money they have and peace they lack.”

The attraction, Jones intones, is baseball, and its special place in America’s history.

“America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again.”

I felt the goosebumps sprout on my forearms as I typed those words I have heard many times.

I felt my throat tighten and the moisture well in my eyes.

That scene affects me just that way every time I watch it.

If I come across “Field of Dreams” while scrolling through the channels I am powerless to resist its charm. I will stay awake well past my normal bedtime just to hear Jones’ voice, the audible equivalent to the embrace of a warm blanket on a winter’s day.

I am similarly affected by other scenes.

Burt Lancaster, in his final film role, gives another eloquent, almost poetic, explanation about baseball.

As the character Archibald “Moonlight” Graham, whose major league career consisted of one half of an inning in right field, with no at bats, Lancaster laments the chance, which he never had, “to squint at a sky so blue that it hurts your eyes just to look at it. To feel the tingling in your arm as you connect with the ball. To run the bases, stretch a double into a triple, and flop face first into third, wrap your arms around the bag.”

You needn’t be a baseball fan to appreciate “Field of Dreams,” to be sure.

Or to be moved to the brink of tears, or perhaps a bit beyond.

Costner’s recollection of his relationship with his father is particularly poignant — a perfect description of the terrible regret that results when you have lost a loved one before you said what you always meant to say, the essential truth. The words that lodged somewhere between your heart and your mouth, a purgatory from which there is no escape, a failure which can’t be rectified, a guilt beyond resolution.

Moonlight Graham’s fateful decision when Ray Kinsella’s daughter chokes on a hot dog.

And of course the film’s finale, when Costner’s voice breaks, ever so slightly, as he asks his father, who has magically appeared, if he’d “like to have a catch.”

Yet for all that it is a different scene, and a different line, that seems to me to distill not the film itself but rather baseball.

It is relatively early in the movie. Shoeless Joe Jackson, the legendary player for whom Costner believes he built the field (we learn the actual inspiration only at the end), has arrived, clad in his Chicago White Sox uniform.

Portrayed by the late Ray Liotta, Jackson explains to Costner what it was like to be banned from baseball for his role in the 1919 World Series betting scandal.

“I’ve heard that old men wake up and scratch itchy legs that have been dust for over 50 years,” Liotta says. “That was me. I’d wake up at night with the smell of the ballpark in my nose, the cool of the grass on my feet.”

And then the single, simple line.

The line that for me distills what baseball means, why it remains America’s pastime even as basketball and, especially, football have surpassed it in popularity.

“The thrill of the grass.”

It is a curious line, I suppose.

Grass can be beautiful. It can, as Liotta said, feel cool underfoot.

But does grass thrill?

I believe that, in the context of baseball, it does.

It is not the only sport played on grass fields, of course.

But unlike, say, football or soccer or lacrosse, a baseball field is not an unbroken swath of lawn.

A baseball field presents a much more compelling sight with its unique geometry and symmetry, its intersections of well-tended grass with the dirt of the mound and the basepaths and the area around home plate.

I had never, before watching “Field of Dreams” for the first time, associated the word “thrill” with grass.

But I understood immediately.

It is the perfect word.

And it contributes a great deal, I think, to a movie that is close to perfect as any is likely to ever be.