In New Hampshire, politics is a lot like baseball. People keep statistics. They retell legends. They handicap their favorite teams.
Political players sign autographs and get their faces put on trading cards.
Dixville Notch throws out the first pitch. In politics here, as in baseball, anything that can happen probably will. And it pays to remember that, no matter how the season looks at the outset, an underdog can always win the pennant. Today, the New Hampshire Historical Society and the Library and Archive of New Hampshire's Political Tradition open an exhibition that is something like a little Hall of Fame of presidential primary politics in New Hampshire. From Dick Upton, who proposed the law that made the primary what it is today, on through Estes Kefauver's astonishing rise, John F. Kennedy's lambasting of the Union Leader, Ronald Reagan's ''I paid for this microphone, Mr. Green'' and Bill Clinton's feeling of our pain, the exhibit maps the road to Pennsylvania Avenue - which primary boosters say leads directly down the Everett Turnpike.