"It's great to be young and a Yankee."

Happy Opening Day!

“The World Champion Yankees are playing the Red Sox at Fenway tonight. The weather is warm and baseball is back.”

I’m in the car right now en route to my parents’ place for Easter, and I’m listening with baited breath for the traffic report to inform me that there’s an Easter miracle and that all the roads are devoid of congestion, but all I hear is that: “The World Champion Yankees are playing the Red Sox at Fenway tonight. The weather is warm and baseball is back.”

Bears repeating.

God, I love the sound of that.

The World Champion Yankees. The not-World-Champion Red Sox. Baseball is back. After 151 days of a cardboard existence, of directionless days and gameless nights, everything is once again right in the world.

Welcome back, boys. As French poet Lamartine once wrote, “Sometimes when one [team] is missing, the world seems depopulated.” And after a somewhat rocky beginning to Spring Training, the Yankees have, in true Bomber form, crystallized in the latter half of preseason, ending on a gold note, everything turning up Milhouse for the reigning champs.

Questions of injury hung over the heads of Posada, Johnson, Aceves, and Marte have all evaporated, giving way to 4 clean bills of health. CC is CC, always a joy, (or as Jeter beams, “His personality is perfect.”) He’ll face the satanic albeit infinitely tamed Beckett tonight, at 8:05 in Boston.

You know what I last remember about Beckett? Him giving up 5 homeruns in one game to Yanks in September. Oh my God, I’m so excited for the season to start again. The return of baseball has been my rock of hope and stability in an otherwise bananas and haphazard reality.

And no matter what anyone says, this is a big game. They all are. Oh, and just to get the ball rolling on the unapologetic denunciation of all things Boston, here’s a completely contradictory, nonsensical quote from a new Suck, Mike Cameron: “I’ve played the Yankees before. It’s built up more by the media than the players. For us, it’s always big. Playing here every day is big. I’m not going to try and make it any bigger than it is.” Good job, dumbass.

If I’ve learned anything from watching the everchanging face of team landscapes, it’s that once a Met, always a Met. You carry your Mets-ness with you wherever you go. Which is not so much for always packing a Visa card, and more like always carrying an STD.

Ah, I digress. Here we go.

So, get excited, Yankee loyalists. The World Series Champions are back to grab the season by the jugular, their appetite for superiority whetted and their hunger for #28 teeming with unbridled adrenaline.