One of the great joys of my life is my decades-long friendships with people who are far to my left. They’re as pro-choice as I am pro-life. They have different ideas of what religious liberty means. They opposed Operation Iraqi Freedom, but when I volunteered to serve, they printed T-shirts with my name on them as a symbol of support. Once I got there, they helped flood my unit with care packages.

And for election cycle after election cycle, the conservatives and liberals in the group debated the races — sometimes in email threads that stretched into thousands of words — but none of it shook our friendships.

Baseball brought us together. We met in law school, discovered our shared love for the game and formed a fantasy baseball league (yes, I’m fully aware of my abject nerdiness). It was a fun marriage of convenience between relative strangers that I thought might last through law school at most.

But 33 years later, our shared values have kept us together — a commitment to truth and compassion in our dealings with each other, a respect for open debate and honest inquiry, an underlying humility that told us that we needed to hear opposing views because none of us is perfect and a willingness to be able to live with disagreement without surrendering to bitterness or anger.

This part of my life is one reason I’m not surprised to see the easy rapport onstage between Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney, or to watch the mutual affection between Adam Kinzinger and the crowd at the Democratic National Convention this summer. I’ve seen Democrats erupt in applause and appreciation for other, less famous, Republicans who’ve laid careers (and sometimes their lives) on the line to defend American democracy.

There are political positions, and then there are deep values, and ultimately — when it comes to the deep values — like often finds like, and friendships that seem unusual can suddenly make sense. And so it was with us. Over time, the baseball part of our relationship faded into the background. The friendship is now the core.