Saturday is a holy day (and today is, too, for some)

Can you feel it? The memory of spring air is so strong now, the skin recalls the joy of it passing over bare arms under a gingerly warm sun. The sounds, oh the sounds once vague and lonely echoing through the chambers of the brain now lively and entertaining an intense symphony of wonder in your mind. Oh, and that color, the green of freshly mowed spring grass, the shiny new white uniforms with the red lettering, the blue sky screaming its lust for life...Saturday, a new Cincinnati Reds season is conceived. The season will be nourished by such sights and sounds as those haunting your winter memory. We will love the newborn season in Spring Training, the infant season in April, the childhood of May, the teenage years of June. We will still love the season during the twenties and thirties of July and the middle age of August. And yes, we will even love the season when it is wrinkled and gray in September, even if it has failed us and we find ourselves watching for its cold, gray October death for the 13th season in a row.

Such magic words are these: pitchers and catchers report. We feel a surge of excitement run through our bodies, lifting a bit of winter's burden from our shoulders and accelerating our want for warmth and light and the crack of the bat. A sense of opportunity comes to us, the kind of opportunity intrinsic to rebirth. Oh, friends, this could be the year. This. Could. Be. The. Year.

On paper, the Reds could be better. Yet what is paper but a mere piece of dead tree with some black toxin splashed upon it in the shapes of language symbols for the dull interpretation of the unimaginative and unemotional? What surprises youth can bring! What redemption, what marvels, what miracles! Hey, even the East coast $ports Network gives us a chance!

So, make ready your shorts and your sunscreen, for the time is approaching when the joy of a new year will be upon us! (And yes, I am already mostly packed for Grapefruit League Spring Training, despite a three week eternity standing between my family and the Sarasota sun!)