If you have never been to Spring Training before, it likely seems to you like Fantasyland. The mythology of Spring Training is so powerful that one can conjure up its world without ever having been there. Close your eyes, and the sensations float right up to you. The crack of the bat. The pop of the glove. Freshly cut grass. Games of long-toss; the thwack of batting practice; coaches running drills, gnawing on sunflower seeds, surveying the boys, "Whadda we got this year?"

To see that Spring Training is here is to see that spring is coming, that baseball will be here soon, that the chill outside your office window will someday recede, that the sun will return again.

Before I went to Spring Training for the first time, this is how I imagined Spring Training. It almost seemed like a forbidden place, allowing entry for the specifically chosen and the wealthy, a Valhalla behind a velvet rope that kept out the freezing riff-raff. You talked to friends who were headed to Spring Training like they'd been selected for a mission to the moon; you'll never go there, but at least you're glad someone you knew got to. It didn't seem a place regular people were allowed to go. You had to work in sports, you had to be wealthy or you had to be retired and living nearby anyway. It was for other people, the lucky few.

So as pitchers and catchers report this week, and Spring Training begins, and all the images of athletes in "the best shape of their life" flash across your various screens, I feel obliged to remind us all of a basic fact about Spring Training: It is not a magical place, where all your wounds are healed, where you can be young and free and warm again. It is not a gateway to a better world. It is not a machine that transports back to a simpler time. It's just Florida. It's just Arizona. It's just a bunch of guys stretching.

And this is good. This is better. This is what we should want it to be.