Editorial: Celebrating our seasons of hope and renewal

We're old school, most of us anyway, products of an era when baseball's claim to be America's pastime was undisputed.

We remember the long-ago nights desperately bridging the chilly divide between the World Series and spring training with the exploits of Johnny Madigan and the Blue Sox in Duane Decker's classic children's novels, Good Field, No Hit; Rebel in Right Field and all the way through to the 13th in the series, The Grand Slam Kid.

Sometimes, early in March, we'd grow so anxious that we'd take shovels out to clear snow off a side street so we could use it for a preseason pick-up game in rubber boots and heavy jackets.

"People ask me what I do in the winter when there's no baseball," said legendary Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby, a Most Valuable Player with the Cubs in 1929. "I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring."

Those were our sentiments exactly, Rajah. Our sentiments exactly.

Baseball returned Thursday, and although the Major League openers popped up on the calendar a little early even for us, any hesitancy we felt about the date quickly evaporated with an 8-4 victory by the Cubs and a 14-7 shellacking by the White Sox.

After one game, both teams still offered possibilities of 162-0 seasons. In fact, Matt Davidson finished the first game on a pace to knock out 486 home runs this year.

Such is the hope of spring.

It is not just baseball. It is inherent in spring itself.

We have friends and relatives who live in the Sunbelt, and we confess to a little envy when Chicago's winters roar the harshest.

But we point out to them the great exhilaration they miss: the arrivals of our springs when suddenly overcast skies turn sunny, temperatures soar into the 70s and the landscape blossoms.

You've experienced what we've experienced. You know what we mean: Suddenly, we are renewed. Suddenly, there is a dance in our step.

That joyful spirit that engulfs us in spring is not something calculated. It is something that just happens. It is nature engulfing us.

"Spring has returned," the mystical poet Rainer Maria Rilke said. "The earth is like a child that knows poems."

That spring bounce in our step is renewal. And it is hope.

Not coincidentally, these are the same elements that are the messages of Easter, the holiest day in the Christian calendar.

"Do not abandon yourself to despair," Pope John Paul II told his Catholic flock. "We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song."

Easter, spring, opening day, all dawn with the same promise: A new season has begun.