Baseball is back.

The games don’t count in the standings and the stars won’t come out for a few weeks. But baseball is back.

Snow still lines the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and bitter cold still blankets most of the nation. The NBA and NHL are in full swing and March is still more well known for its madness than for the coming of spring. … training. But baseball is back.

For some, baseball is the soundtrack to their summer. It’s a cold beer on a hot day. It’s hot dogs and nachos and the sounds of cracking bats and roaring crowds. It comes through the radio or television when you can open all the windows in the house and let it drift over your very existence. And it’s back.

For many others, baseball goes beyond that. It is a religion. It is a yearly ritual that begins in February and ends in late October, sometimes early November. It is an essential part of their lives. They spend Superbowl Sunday thinking about lineup construction. They’ve been thinking about 2018 contention windows since 2013. They spent the offseason re-watching games from a year ago to scout players who have moved teams. They study labor agreement law and the finer details of contract construction.

They worship at the altar of the American pastime.

The parade of mostly meaningless statistics shall begin posthaste. The time for overanalyzing every pitch, every swing, and every little bit of body language has arrived. It is once again time for previously unheard of players to make names for themselves. It is again time for some teams and players to learn, all too early, the ever-present lesson that no baseball season comes without injuries and other unforeseen setbacks. Now comes the time for grand declarations and bold proclamations and for the game to serve us all a huge dose of humility. Baseball is back.

The fighting over young players can move from being entirely speculative to being based on entirely too small of a sample size. The questions of which veterans still have plenty left will be blown out of proportion in all kinds of directions. Big acquisitions will be heavily critiqued and some fans will even keep an eye on that player their team let go, wondering what might have been. And 30 fanbases find themselves looking up and down a roster with some familiar names, and some not so familiar ones, thinking “Maybe. Just maybe.”

Every journey begins with a single step. For all the wonderous pomp and circumstance that comes with Opening Day, each ballplayer will tell you that the journey of their 2018 season begins today.

It is a small step, more of a shuffle forward really. But those who put in the work now—and that includes the coaching staffs and front offices—will reap the fruit of that labor in the fall. Hard work must be backed up by smart work. Self-work must be backed by teamwork. And knowing full well that they can’t possibly anticipate everything that will happen to them, like early sailors on the open seas, they must set forth with one philosophy and one heartbeat.

Baseball is back, baby.