If you love baseball, then today was your Christmas — the day you’ve waited all year for. If you don’t love baseball, then you just have no soul.

Opening Day is the most holy of all high holidays. It has more religious symbolism than the World Cup, and is more important than Super Bowl Sunday. It is the official end of winter, and the it’s the most optimistic day of the year. Baseball is life and opening day is the birth. If ever there was a day to spout hackneyed cliches, then opening day is it.

Each Opening Day I follow the same ritual. At around eleven in the morning, I fake an illness that requires me to be rushed to the hospital. My employer is slowly getting wise to this ritual. A few years ago a simple stomach ache would do the trick, but this year I was forced to come down with a serious case of heartworms. Fortunately, I work with a bunch of nitwits. After changing clothes in the parking lot, we then speed downtown to The Old Shillelagh where we proceed to sell our unused tickets from last year to the drunks. Finally, it’s off to Comerica Park to make an offering to Charlie Gehringer and Hank Greenberg.

The sun was shining. The skies were blue. Unlike most years, it was a blistering sixty-nine degrees. It was heaven. Dmitri Young hit three home runs. Jeremy Bonderman mowed them down all afternoon. And the Tigers won 11 to 2. The only thing that could have made the day better would have been if the beer was free and the fat guy sitting next to me had kept his shirt on.