Once upon a time, I worshiped this day. My parents would get me out of school on Opening Day so I could head down to 33rd Street – just a few blocks from my current office – and watch the Orioles open the baseball season. Baltimore always opened at home, and I pretty much always went.

Over time, Opening Day and baseball in general have diminished in importance in my life. I still play in a fantasy baseball league, but enjoy the social aspect more than following the sport. It’s no surprise why I finish in the middle to bottom of the pack each year.

A lot of things have influenced this change in my life over the past 10-15years. I still followed the Orioles closely in the late 1990s when they had some pretty good teams. I covered the team off and on for the paper in Hanover where I worked until 1998.

But then we had a kid. And I started a day job which required a long commute. And Peter Angelos started running the Orioles with the same skill I ran my fantasy league team. There was a strike. Bud Selig took over the league. Soccer slowly crept into my life.

I didn’t walk away from baseball and move towards soccer as some sort of protest. I had followed MLS in the late 1990s, but not as crazily as I did in the beginning of the next decade. I found lots of ways to follow soccer on the Internet and met lots of great friends that way. Little by little, baseball receded into the background.

That doesn’t mean I don’t care. I enjoyed seeing the Orioles gain some measure of success last year. I do try my best to put together a strong team in my fantasy league even if I don’t have the time or interest to obsess over potential players. The sport had too much of a hold on me in my youth for me to walk away completely.

So Opening Day may not mean the same thing it did when I was 11, and I watched the Birds begin their march to the World Series with a 5-3 win over the White Sox. At least I think I went to that game. On Opening Day, facts don’t always matter because a new season is built for boasts and exaggerations. That’s why I have a some hope that the O’s will actually contend and I might threaten for my first fantasy league title in almost 20 years in this league.

Play Ball!