the start
Baseball season is starting this week. There is nothing like Opening Day here in Milwaukee, where pretty much everything within a mile radius of Miller Park turns into a tailgate party regardless of the weather. One-hundred and sixty-two games from now, we’ll all have found out who the winners and losers are, and we’ll eagerly wait for the announcement “catchers and pitchers report this Monday.”
But what is it about Opening Day? To paraphrase every baseball movie, it’s the time when every team is a Championship team. Right now, everyone out there is thinking, “This is the year!” (well, except Baltimore and Houston). Right now, all we see is the possibility of greatness.
It’s the same reason why an eighteen-hour drive to go on vacation seems so much shorter than the eighteen-hour drive back home.
This is going to be awesome!
One of life’s hardening lessons is to temper your enthusiasm with realistic expectations. Adults who wear their desires on their sleeve are considered naive at worst or hopelessly romantic at best. So we take our wants and desires and keep them secret, lest the world scoff at our childish beliefs. But we still have them, and harbor them, but now we don’t let ourselves get too carried away because that would be silly.
Opening Day is when Adults can come together and share in the childish notion that maybe this year is the year our team will win. Nobody even has to say it out loud and expose themselves; there is just an unspoken understanding between everyone present. You can look into the eyes of another fan and see that they think the same thing, and the shared secret makes it even better.
When every team is 0-0…
When every adventure is just getting under way…
There exists the dream of achieving greatness.
