In some ways, Opening Day is just another day of baseball -- one out of 162 games in a long and winding season. But it doesn’t feel like that right now, does it?

No, as Thursday’s first pitch approaches, it feels like a heaping jug of water after crawling through the desert, like sunlight after months of hibernation, like you -- to paraphrase Rogers Hornsby -- spent an entire winter staring out the window and someone finally showed up to open it and let you out.

I find myself wanting to have 14 different screens in front of me today, each featuring a different game, all spread out in front of me. I don’t want to miss a thing. I want to absorb every second of it.

But this is not, generally, how we consume baseball. Every pitch is important, every game matters today, but they do, in the end, all matter equally. Opening Day feels bigger than it actually is. You get used to baseball happening every day as the season goes along -- and that’s what’s so great about it. Baseball is routine. It is constant. And that brings comfort.

Opening Day is wonderful because we’ve been without baseball for so long. It’s a reminder of what you missed. But in a week, you’ll forget that you ever missed it. That’s how baseball season works. Once we’re in the middle of it, we take it for granted. (We always end up taking the best, most important things for granted. We don’t appreciate how lost we’d be without them until they’re gone.)

So many of baseball’s best are going to be on display today. You’re going to see Paul Skenes. You’re going to see Aaron Judge. You’re going to see Shohei Ohtani, though not pitching -- not quite yet. You’re going to see Juan Soto in a Mets jersey, Blake Snell in a Dodgers jersey, Alex Bregman in a Red Sox jersey. You’re going to see your favorite team run out onto the field, with infinite possibilities laying out before them: They’re in first place, after all. Maybe this is the year.

That’s all to be soaked up, to be reveled in and savored. I know I’ll be doing that all day. It’s what we have waited for.

But it’s still abnormal. The true joy of baseball is what happens every day for the next six months. There are 14 games on Thursday, nine more on Friday, 15 on Saturday, 13 on Sunday, 14 on Monday and on and on and on. It will continue like that all the way deep into September.

Do you know what you’ll be doing in September? Do you know what life’s going to be like? Do you know anything about September 2025 in this chaotic world at all? Here’s one thing you do know: There will be baseball, because the point of baseball season is that it is always happening. That’s what I will try to remember this Opening Day, and what I encourage you to try to remember.

We don’t know where this season will go. We just know that it will go. It’s a blessing, a gift. I’m going to appreciate it every minute today. I probably won’t do as good of a job of appreciating it next month, much less in August. But it’ll be just as important. It’ll mean just as much. And I’ll miss it just as much when it’s gone.

Baseball is back. How did we ever make it through the long, cold winter without it?