Wrote it down in December. In my actual notebook, with a pen, which I did on purpose so I couldn’t delete it later: Tom. Do NOT get swept up in Cubs optimism next spring. You are sixty-three years old. You know better. They’re going to build you up and then somewhere around late July you’re going to be checking injury reports at eleven p.m. and arguing with your nephew Marcus on the phone and you’re going to feel terrible and tired and you’ll swear off baseball again and you won’t quit. You never quit.

That was December. This is March 26th. They play the Nationals today at Wrigley, first pitch at 1:20, Matthew Boyd on the mound, and I am already excited. I was excited yesterday. I was excited when I woke up this morning. I am going to be excited until something awful happens, and then I am going to be extremely irritated with myself for being excited, and then I’m going to get excited again. This is the cycle. This is the whole thing.

The front office went and got Alex Bregman this offseason, which they know perfectly well is the kind of move that hooks me. You don’t get Alex Bregman if you’re not serious. That’s a serious player on a serious contract, acquired by serious people who want to win a serious pennant. I know they want me to think that. I know this is exactly how it works. The Cubs have been making me feel like this year is different for the better part of my adult life, and I have been falling for it for the better part of my adult life, and here we are.

My brother-in-law Phil — Sox fan, the last loyal one, God help him — called me Saturday to say he hoped I enjoyed the next four months “before the wheels come off.” Phil has said some version of this to me every spring since approximately 2009. The year the Cubs won it all, in 2016, Phil said the wheels were going to come off in July and then they did not come off and they won the World Series and Phil claimed he’d “seen it coming” since May, which is not what he said in May, and I still have the texts. I did not mention the texts. I’m sixty-three. I’ve learned to pick my battles.

What I will say about this year — cautiously, with both hands on the railing — is that Boyd looked genuinely good in spring training. Not “looked good for spring training” good, which is a different and lower standard, but actually good. Fourteen wins last season. A 3.21 ERA. An All-Star nod. The man can pitch. He is a real pitcher on a real major league baseball team that also has Alex Bregman and a bullpen that I am choosing not to think about until I absolutely have to, which will probably be June.

The national people are saying the Cubs could beat the Dodgers. The national people have said things before. But they are saying it this year with some conviction, and I have been watching this team long enough to know the difference between boilerplate preseason optimism and actual structural competence. This has the texture of the latter, possibly. I think. I’m not getting my hopes up.

I have my hopes up.

Opening Day at Wrigley is a thing that still does something to me, I’ll admit that. I’ve walked down Clark Street on Opening Day more times than I can count and it never fully normalizes — the crowd, the noise, the ivy that’s just starting to green up along the outfield walls, the sense that anything is genuinely possible because nothing has happened yet. Forty-four thousand people collectively agreeing to believe. It’s a little delusional. I mean that affectionately. Chicago runs on a very specific combination of dogged realism and inexplicable hope, and the Cubs are where those two things live in closest proximity.

My nephew Marcus — the same nephew I argue with on the phone in July — texted me this morning to say he was sorry for what he said last October, and that this year the Cubs were going all the way, and could I make sure to record the opener in case he gets stuck in a meeting. I told him I would. I did not tell him I’d already set two separate DVR reminders and cleared my afternoon calendar. Some things you keep to yourself. Go Cubs.