Do you know what today wasn’t?
Odds are it wasn’t your birthday. (If it was, happy birthday. For rest of you. . .no happy birthday.)
It wasn’t Easter, or Christmas or Thanksgiving. But, then you never expected it to be.
No, today was not a lot of things, most of which were never expected. But, the saddest thing that today was not is that today was not Opening Day.
The stadium at the corner of Edgar and Dave in Seattle sits empty. The House that Ruth built, or rather the house they built after the House that Ruth built is quiet. The great cathedrals of America’s pasttimes are silent and deserted on this first unofficial day of Spring.
I guess you can say we knew this day wasn’t going to be Opening Day. We’ve known it for weeks. But, we believed it would be Opening Day for much longer than we’ve known it wouldn’t.
Fans look forward to Opening Day starting with the final out of the previous year’s World Series. And for some, they start looking after the last out of their teams that fell short of the World Series, or even the playoffs. For other’s, like my beleaguered Mariners, we start thinking about Opening Day at the point our team is eliminated from the possibility of the playoffs.
Opening Day is not just a day on the calendar. It’s the unofficial start of Spring. It’s the end of the long cold winter. It snowed in Utah today. We woke up to 3″ on the lawns and the trees. In any other year, I would laugh at the snow. I would laugh at nature’s attempt to delay the inevitable.
But, not this year. This year our March snow is one more reminder that regardless of the calendar, the winter drags on. There is much debate of when the season might start. And even some debate of the necessity of abandoning the season all together.
So, today, on March 26th, in a depressing twist of fate, the two words that should have been the most exciting are actually the two saddest words in sports.
“PLay Ball.”
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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