He broadcast his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers 70 years ago. Seventy. That is when it began for Vin Scully, who remains the enduring voice -- the great voice -- of baseball even in retirement. He is 92 now, going on 93. It means that he has lived long enough that he will see a baseball season begin in July this time.

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He broke Red Auerbach’s cardinal rule for aging back in April when, had it not been for the pandemic that has changed the world, the baseball season would have already been nearly a month old. And the Auerbach rule was simple enough:

Don’t fall.

Vin Scully did. “Headfirst slide,” he told me in an e-mail when he was recovering.

The injuries at the time were described as “unspecified.” They were serious enough, at his age, to put him in the hospital for a while. But then he was home and doing what the rest of us have been doing for months, which means waiting for baseball to come back. He had seen seasons interrupted across his grand baseball life, the way the 1981 season, one that ended with the Dodgers beating the Yankees in the World Series, was interrupted because of a player strike.

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In 1994, he had seen a season ended in the middle of August, a month later than the 2020 season is scheduled to begin, and even saw the World Series cancelled that year because of another labor dispute, the most bitter in the game’s history.

Now Vin Scully has seen Spring Training end prematurely because of the coronavirus, and the start of the season postponed, because this virus has changed life in this country.

And when I e-mailed him the other day to ask how he was doing and feeling, Mr. Scully gave me an answer that didn’t just make him sound as if he were speaking for himself, but for the game to which he devoted his immense talent -- and that voice -- for seven extraordinary, elegant decades:

“After the fall,” he wrote, “bloody but unbowed. And now baseball is back.”

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Baseball was bloodied this time, primarily by this virus, in a way that no one could possibly have imagined when pitchers and catchers first reported to Florida and Arizona. Now we get players reporting next week, all over the baseball map, from Yankee Stadium to Dodger Stadium. Spring Training now becomes summer training.

But it will be different without people in the stands -- of course it will, everything is different. It will still be baseball. And even with everything that has happened, it will still be the first major team sport in this country to be back on the field, for Opening Day in July this time if the virus doesn’t change everything again.

And when baseball is back on the field, even in empty stadiums, it will remind us of what we have been missing, through all the months of conversation about the past, about seasons past, about the giants of the game. Back in May, around the time of Willie Mays’ 89th birthday, I called Scully to ask him about Mays, just because the legendary announcer, even working Dodgers games, saw as much of Mays, over time, as anybody.

His answer came back in capital letters:

“SIMPLY PUT THE BEST PLAYER I EVER SAW.”

But this was Scully, always so precise with his detail about the game he was broadcasting, so he added this:

“CAVEAT … ONLY SAW HIM REALLY VS. NL TEAMS.”

Then the gentleman out of Fordham University, Vincent E. Scully from the graduating class of 1949, apologized for being brief, explaining that he was still pretty beat-up at the time.

Few have loved baseball as long as Mr. Scully has. No one has ever loved it as well. No voice has mattered more to the game’s soundtrack, from helping narrate the story of the Boys of Summer in the 1950s, to his perfect call of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game in '65 (“On the scoreboard in right field it is 9:46 p.m. in the City of Angels….”) to the night Hank Aaron hit No. 715 in '74.

And then there was this, from one October night in the City of Angels in 1988, when Kirk Gibson hit one out against Dennis Eckersley:

"In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.”

We have not just missed moments like those. We have missed baseball. Summer training next week. Vin Scully has given us one more great call. Who else?

Bloody, unbowed, baseball is back.