Wait until next year

So, after a brief hiatus I thought I’d quickly post to mark Opening Day. That is, the first day of the new baseball season. Well, that is discounting a couple of games that took place in Japan last week and a game in Miami yesterday, but still, let’s not be picky. Everyone else, including my team – the Mets, are starting their season today. So Opening Day it is.

And while we’re marking Opening Days, it is the first day of the English cricket County Championship – the most traditional, and perhaps best, form of the game.

If much of the appeal of sport comes from the symbolism, the relevance to real life and the representation of daily struggles through an ordered game (probably a discussion for another time, but bear with me here), then Opening Day surely has some more meaning that just the fun and anticipation of the start of the new season.

It is a new start. It is last time of unbridled hope, before the inevitable disappointment that sport dishes out so well. Or, if you’re feeling optimistic, the last innocent moments before a welcome surprise. I’m sure there is something about renewal, rebirth in there, it is Spring after all, but I don’t want to get too pseudo-whatever too soon.

There is certainly something invigorating in a new start, and sport offers us a fresh slate every season. If only life were so straightforward – but perhaps the ebb and flow of sporting seasons are as much an anchor in our lives as the seasons of the year. I already recall years according to sporting events, mark the passage of each year according to what sport is being played, what sporting event is coming up.

Anyway, there’ll be more posts to follow. Spring, new starts and all that. Then the inevitable disappointment!

Play ball!

Image from the Library of Congress, via Flickr