Patriots season is over.

Red Sox season has started.

If you are a New England sports degenerate, there is no “off season.” Not with the north wind blowing, the wood stove glowing and snow and ice collecting on the pickup truck in the driveway.

We must save a corner of the cranium for the fantasy of sports to fight the ravages of cabin fever. It gets a little harder every year. Forget the Celtics. The Bruins don’t count.

I, for one, am already thinking about the Red Sox, Florida, Fort Myers and City of Palms Park. Sure, they have no center fielder or shortstop, and Johnny Damon (traitor) has moved to New York. My check for this season’s tickets had not been cashed yet, and I called Tuesday to find out why. Without those tickets, 80-degree days and the accompanying palm trees, I am a dead man.

When I started in 1993, you could stroll to the spring training park anytime and pick up a $5 ticket. Now, the only way to get a seat is to buy tickets at $20 per game. That would be outrageous if Fenway seats (once 50 cents … I am that old) didn’t go for $100. Spring training seats are, relatively, a bargain.

What is no longer a bargain is the damned motel rooms. When I started going to Fort Myers, the palatial Royal Palm went for $30 a day, walking distance to the park and the smallest swimming pool in the state. That meant about $10 per day, per person and all the barbed-wire towels you could use.

Not a bad deal.

The motel suite I got last year for $59 a day (Manny Ramirez stayed there for a while) is now $175 a day. All the rooms are like that since the Red Sox won the World Series and cost me a fortune. Try Sanibel or Captiva, the luxurious island off Fort Myers. Rooms start at $250 and go up, way up.

Now the front-runners and retiring baby boomers are screwing everything up. Try to get a table at a good Fort Myers restaurant. Try to get a table at a lousy restaurant.

You can’t even get into the Minnesota Twins games across town. Red Sox fans who are shut out at their home park are settling for Twins tickets. Now, even that place is sold out.

Success has ruined everything.

I have been relegated to a KOA campground on Pine Island, about a 20-mile drive from the ballpark. If it weren’t for the variety of snakes and bugs that Florida seems to feature, I would pitch a tent.

Thank God for Maine transplant Mark Preston, who is now delivering cement across Florida. He has a camper, and I have reservations for a site which features electricity, free wireless computer access and cable television, just in time for “The Sopranos.” That will cost about $40 a night plus all the Allen’s coffee brandy that Preston can swallow.

If the Red Sox lose for another 86 years, I might be able to move back downtown. Unfortunately, I will be 151 years old.

When I called the Red Sox, the nice woman said I was not on the season’s ticket list.

Say what?

When I stopped screaming, then whimpering, she said something about Fenway Park. I realized she was looking at the wrong list. She checked the Fort Myers list and there I was.

The tickets will be here next week. I will leave for Florida after the Super Bowl, where the Patriots should have been.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at emmetmeara@msn.com.