Opening day’s biological component

Pardon me if I sound like one of those baseball poets today. I don’t mean to, honestly I don’t. But just as I was having my first cup of coffee on Monday morning, it dawned on me that another baseball season had gotten under way. It was no April Fools’ Day joke, either, despite the fact that on the same day that the Red Sox were playing their opener at Fenway Park, the sports world was still caught up in the final wintry thrills of the college basketball tournament and the University of Maine hockey team still had a few days before it would be tested in the Frozen Four.

It was opening day in America, and suddenly the world seemed right again, it’s seasonal balance and essential harmony restored.

If I had any self-restraint at all, in fact, I’d try to avoid making this column read like another ode to baseball. After all, there are a slew of newspaper hacks all over the country hammering out paeans to the game, and a lot of them doing it better than I ever could. Before Monday was over, and the ceremonial first pitches had been tossed out in ballparks across the country, the baseball balladeers would all have produced reams of romantic tributes to the simple beauty of the game and its ability to root itself so deeply into our national consciousness.

There’s really no need for me to add my voice to the chorus.

So forgive me my excesses when I say that, for a few pleasant moments on Monday, the rainy and raw picture outside my window magically brightened. A warm breeze took the edge off the chill, replacing any lingering thoughts of snow with visions of the long summer days ahead. I smelled the uniquely intoxicating scent of infield dirt, heard the familiar crack of the bat, and felt the ageless compulsion to oil up my glove and go outside to have a catch with someone.

Poetical notions aside, you see, there really is a biological component to baseball that is difficult to resist, no matter how old you get. When you’ve immersed yourself in the game as a kid, abandoned yourself to its leisurely charms through many childhood seasons, baseball’s allure never fades.

It’s like a virus, dormant in winter, that’s always ready to flare up again each spring and flood the out-of-shape adult with impossible yearnings to recapture some of his long-ago youth.

Soon, parents everywhere will be congregating at Little League fields on lovely spring evenings to watch their hopeful kids being tested in team tryouts. And as the coaches put the kids through their drills, the fathers will lean on the fences and stare wistfully, remembering when they used to play the game and wondering how the heck all that time could have passed so quickly.

Most of the fathers will have to go back a long way to recall their last carefree days on a baseball field, back before the pressures of making a living and raising a family made the world feel like anything but a game.

But as they stand there in their work clothes, smelling the rich dirt and hearing the familiar sounds, the old virus will flare up again. It always does. And they’ll want to grab their gloves and run around like the kids they used to be.

Baseball has always been our nation’s most seductive fantasy in that regard. It seems forever accessible, a pastime filled with the elusive promise of a second chance at youthfulness, redemption and maybe even a little of the innocent glory that we missed the first time around. It’s an escape that’s always beckoning from the other side of the fence, where any middle-aged dreamer can simply shed his jacket and tie and imagine that he’s right back into the game again.

OK, I’ll stop gushing now. I didn’t mean to go on like that, honestly I didn’t, but I couldn’t help myself. Opening day is a seasonal affliction, after all. And if you indulged me this far, you’ve probably got it as bad as I do.