No substitute for Opening Day

We can argue all day about whether or not professional football has overtaken baseball as America's national pastime. If television ratings and advertising dollars are your calculus for determining the winner of that argument, then the NFL probably wins going away.

And for years, many sports fans have wondered aloud if the Super Bowl should be moved to Monday and be declared a national holiday.

As special as the Super Bowl feels, and as wonderful as the NFL seems on kick-off weekend, something special remains in baseball's Opening Day, something football can't match, regardless what the modern TV numbers suggest.

Much of it can be attributed to timing. Baseball opens after what, for many people in America, has been a bleak winter. Whipping winds and blinding snowdrifts give way to a greening of the twigs and a sky-high blueness blessed with a tinge of cloud puffs. Temperatures are climbing, not falling as in autumn, when football is often followed by the unpacking of the winter wear. Baseball signals -- it may be trite, but it's no less true -- the latest annual promise of what may be the best season of all: the gentle, mild caress of spring.

And baseball offers the prospect of redemption, for this week's five-game losing streak can quickly be turned into next week's -- or next month's -- six-game run of winners. Because baseball stretches across so much of the calendar, there is no desperation in a loss. Baseball teams may indeed be only as good as their next starters, but the comfort that comes with another tomorrow makes today's setback seem somehow more endurable, and Opening Day is where it all begins.

There is, in the very words, something sacred-sounding. You almost expect to see the letters, in block white, placed along the tops of church bulletin boards as you walk along the avenue on your way to the park. Children succumb to the temptation to skip school, and forgiving fathers -- mothers, too -- properly give the nod. For they know that this day comes but once a year, and no other day in any other sport can match what Openng Day offers.

Things change, pastimes pass in and out of prominence, and baseball long ago may very well have been supplanted as America's favorite sport. But there is nothing in sports quite like Opening Day, and it is here, again, and it is good.