HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL....

It's Major League Baseball's (and, oh, the National League too...) Opening Day. Major League News leads with the story:

A reason for optimism in Boston: Red Sox have what it takes to challenge Yankees

With the exception of the view from those Green Monster-top seats -- Dramamine and soft drinks served at your bar stool -- things are looking up in Boston. As far as we know, Babe Ruth's piano still resides at the bottom of that lake. But everything else possible has been done to lift that curse that has kept the Red Sox without a World Series title since 1918....Bring on the Yankees. It has always been about that, of course, even before reconfigured divisions left the two teams as the most obvious competitors for the AL East title, and long before a winter's rancor turned the rivalry even more personal.

Of course, I read all this with the same old ridiculous joy and hope. If you have the disease too, click here.

"Hope" is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops at all -
(Emily Dickinson, #63...who would've been a Sox fan by region,
and by her empathic attraction to the absurd)