Editor’s Note: This column appears in the February 23rd Edition of ESPN the Magazine

(Just Kidding. Editor’s Real Note: This was originally written for Perspectives in Modern Legal Thought in the Spring Semester of 2003.)

Never mind the precise time when the length of day equals the length of night. Pay no heed to the vernal equinox. Ignore March 21. Spring starts in the middle of February.

You may say to yourself when reading those lines, “what about the tremendous snowstorm we just experienced, that happened right in the middle of February? That seemed winter like.” I say that it’s irrelevant. Why? Because one week before the “Blizzard of 2003” dumped her massive payload of snow on the Eastern Seaboard, pitchers and catchers reported to Spring Training.

In Florida and Arizona, over the course of the week beginning on February 9th, teams were allowed to begin official workouts for their pitchers (who need and are allowed about a week more time to get ready than position players) and catchers (who are necessary for the pitchers to throw to).

This annual mid-February descent of players and coaches onto the warm states of Florida and Arizona does more to warm my heart and soul than any sunshine could. It is the rebirth of baseball. It is the reappearance of “The Boys of Summer.” It is a time when every team has aspirations of making the postseason and ultimately winning the World Series.

Last spring, the talk was of collective bargaining agreements, work stoppages, competitive balances and contraction. People said that only teams in the top echelon of payroll had a chance. Predictions of a New York Yankees championship abounded. But then the season started. The Yankees starting pitching looked vulnerable. The Oakland Athletics, the recent champion of the small market teams, and the model of how to build a winning team while keeping the payroll low, started winning as well. The Minnesota Twins, another team with a small payroll, and a victim of the proposed contraction, started to pull away from the rest of the teams in their division. And the Anaheim Angels managed to squeak into the postseason, beating the Seattle Mariners and Boston Red Sox for the coveted wild-card spot. And then a magical thing happened. The Angels got hot. They met the Yankees in the first round, thoroughly outplayed them, and soundly beat the team with a payroll twice its own. The Twins also managed an upset of the A’s, and the American League Championship Series was a small market affair. The Angels, an offensive juggernaut that was nearly unstoppable, rumbled to an eventual World Championship. All this from a team that had finished the previous season six games under .500 and 41 games behind the division champion Mariners. The Angels had given new life to the championship aspirations of even the lowliest teams.

So, this spring, there is no more talk of the eventual destruction of baseball. Debates about contraction, whether it is legal, whether it is good for baseball and the logistics of how it would work, have all been tabled. The owners of the baseball franchises and the Major League Baseball Players Association have agreed on a new collective bargaining agreement and staved off a lockout or strike. And the imposition of a luxury tax on payrolls over a certain threshold and the success of the small market teams last summer and fall have limited talk about the competitive balance in baseball to only a few rumblings about “The Evil Empire” that is the New York Yankees baseball organization. This spring, the talk is about baseball. The questions that are asked by fans all over the country are about the game on the field, and not the games off of it. Will the Angels repeat as Champions? Will Hideki Matsui be the real deal, or a real bust? Will David Cone be able to recapture the magic that once flowed through his arm? Will the Mets ever find someone to play third base? These are the questions that give rise to endless conversations with friends.

The Dictionary defines “spring” in two ways. First, “The season of the year, occurring between winter and summer, during which the weather becomes warmer and plants revive, extending in the Northern Hemisphere from the vernal equinox to the summer solstice and popularly considered to comprise March, April, and May.” Second is this definition, “a time of growth and renewal.” What purpose does the second definition serve, when the first is so clear and exact? Exactly the one I have been describing. There are those, like me, for whom the vernal equinox will simply not explain the beginning of spring. There are those people that see the words “growth and renewal” and do not think of flowers, but rather they think of green, perfectly manicured grass. “Renewal” to them speaks of veterans trying for one last push towards a championship and of teams that suffered the agony of a losing season last year starting fresh with a perfect record of 0-0 on Opening Day. “Growth” is the blossoming of a “can’t miss” prospect into a superstar major leaguer or a rookie trying just to make the major league squad.

This past week in New York, and in cities up and down the East Coast, baseball fans couldn’t see the grass, but we could smell it. We could taste the hot dogs, peanuts and beer. And while we sat on couches in living rooms across the country, watching snow fall outside, we dreamt of sun-drenched days at the ballpark, watching baseball being played.

The New York Times puts the weather page on the back page of the sports section. This is more than just a consequence of layout and space. This is done, particularly in February, because there are two conflicting weather reports in every morning’s paper. Every morning, I open my newspaper and smile at the pictures from Tampa and Port St. Lucie. The color-coded map may say, “Winter,” but the pictures contained within the sports pages declare, “Spring.” I trust baseball players and coaches much more than I trust meteorologists. Ignore the snow, ignore the date. Spring has started.