March Mildness

I have tried to be mad about March, honest I have. It just never captured my interest the way college bowl season does, or a great many professional sporting events. To me, March is dealing with the sudden void of football, with the attendant discussions of the upcoming draft and free agency. Ultimately this is unfulfilling as it strains to be anything but hypothetical, and it is only useful the following January if you can remember how you were the one who said that this would be Peyton's year after all.
March is also about Spring Training. It's that weird portion of the baseball season that takes place in distant, exotic locales such as Mesa, Arizona and Coral Gables, Florida. I was reminded of the almost absurd intimacy of these contests last night as I watched the Oakland A's battle the San Francisco Giants. Maybe "battle" is a little strong, since most of the stars were absent from the lineup or only played sparingly. But as I watched the local broadcast of the game, what intrigued me was this: you could hear individual voices shouting out from the stands. Not just a periodic outburst from behind the plate, but distant echoing bellows of great concrete slabs of a park designed to hold forty-some sections of die-hard types who make annual, whimsical or annual whimsical pilgrimages to the cactus or grapefruit leagues to see the up and comer, the has been and the never was. It's baseball, and you can see it from the parking lot if you don't feel like lugging your picnic all the way into the stadium. You can sit just off the left field line, ten rows from the field for ten bucks. This leaves plenty of extra cash for the giant foam finger you'll need to buy so that come playoff time, you can say that you had it way back during spring training.
For me, March isn't about endings, it's all about beginnings.