Now we can finally call it spring.

This lovely season arrived over the weekend with a flourish and a sublime synchronicity of events that, for many of us, was the unmistakable sign from the heavens we had been waiting for for so long.

Just a day after we had turned our clocks ahead, lifting us gratefully out of the long dark season of the last five months and into extended daylight, the beloved Red Sox and the evil Yankees appeared on our TV screens and the curtain went up on another glorious baseball season.

A mere coincidence? I don’t think so.

On Monday, as I was sipping my morning coffee on the porch, I felt as if a seasonal balance and essential harmony had somehow been restored to the winter-weary world. For a few moments, the rainy and raw weather of the last several days had been magically dispelled. In my imagination, the gray skies suddenly seemed to open up a crack, the day brightened and a warm breeze took the edge off the chill. Any lingering thoughts of spring snow showers were replaced with a tantalizing vision of the long summer days that lie ahead.

I could swear I smelled the intoxicating scent of infield dirt and heard the familiar crack of the bat. I even felt the ageless urge to oil up my glove and head outside to have a catch.

It was opening day in America, and even the potholes I clattered through on the way to work seemed a little less irksome.

This happens every year, of course. Yet even after having lived through decades of opening days, I am no more immune to the charms of baseball as an adult than I was when I was a kid and the neighborhood diamond was my whole world in summer. It’s no mystery, really. When played with passion and enthusiasm in childhood, baseball is not just another enjoyable pastime but a seasonal obsession that gets into your blood early on and never lets go. The game’s incomparable beauty, elegant geometry and perfect pacing give it a monolithic endurance, an ability to root itself into our national consciousness in a way that no other sport can match.

A few weeks from now, I’ll be able to wander over to the city’s Little League ball fields on a fine spring evening and find plenty of other grown-ups who are similarly afflicted. I’ll see it in the faces of the fathers as they line the fences, watching intently as the coaches put the kids through their tryout drills. The men will compare notes of their own, too, remembering wistfully when they were the children dashing around the field and wondering just how all the years could have passed so quickly.

Throughout the tranquil evening, the plinking of the bats and the popping of the gloves will take them back. Or it might be the rich smell of the infield dust that does it, or baseball’s uniquely nonsensical chatter that hasn’t changed in generations.

Whatever the trigger, middle-aged men who haven’t played in a single baseball game for years will feel the timeless impulse to grab their gloves and run around like the kids they used to be.

For those fleeting moments, baseball will seem entirely accessible again, the great escape waiting there on the other side of the fence. Just throw off the jackets, the neckties, the yoke of adult responsibility and get right back into the game.

If you’re one of the willing victims of this seductive seasonal fantasy, then welcome to another opening day in America. Welcome to spring.