The State Fair is two thirds the way home. We may have a solution to fish kills. The Husker Spring Game is a sellout. America may make history in November.

But if you're looking for seasonal symbolism, keep the shades drawn this morning. There's no baseball, no spring.

If you can manage staying home today well it's good to be you.

Here's Friday's forecast: "Yeesh!" with a Mud and Oozing Mud Warning for Second Street and isolated outbreaks of miserable throughout the day. Central Nebraskans' weather patience barometer is holding steady at DefCon 2.

As I write Thursday afternoon, snow is beginning to fall, a few flakes the size of bagels floating viciously toward the earth, crushing for another day any hope that spring will actually occur this year.

And baseball.

Yes, we have played baseball, mostly in frigid temps or gale force winds or both. Imagine a month-long tournament in Greenland.

I suppose somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright. A baseball game is in progress. Men laugh, children shout, a band plays.

Elsewhere, we're shoveling snow.

Fit, tan

Still, one of the tenets of baseball is its underlying hope, the undeniable optimism of Opening Day when every team starts the same, each with a record of 0-0, on a level playing field, green and expansive, bathed in warm sunlight.

Hey, a guy can dream can't he?

Breaking out the bats and mitts is to summer what the first day of school is to fall: Neither follows a calendar. School starts long before we don the earth tones and woolens of autumn; the first pitch of baseball is nearly 10 weeks before the summer solstice.

But to my knowledge, the Gregorians never made it to the World Series (rumor had it they couldn't hit a slider), so regardless of what the calendar says, when a masked man in blue yells "Play Ball!" we can smell the barbecue, plan the picnic and aspire to fritter away a couple warm, long, lazy days at the ballpark.

Nobody is playing baseball around here today, in our beloved Mudville.

We have to be content to watch television baseball, where well-muscled professionals like Nebraskans Joba Chamberlain and Alex Gordon, fit and tan from their training in Florida, ply their trade in the relative balm of New York City and Kansas City.

But keeping track of gazillionaire players with stocking caps under their hats and parkas in the dugout elicits only a shrug from those of us who watch helplessly as baseball here evaporates in a white cloud the second week of April.

Wind chill truth

They tell me a warm front will arrive Sunday, a can't miss prospect, bound to stay around the league a while, bringing with it a blazing sun and an azure sky.

And baseball.

We've heard the hype before, only to have our hearts broken. We know how it feels to have a 62 and sunny turn out to be a 47 riding a nasty norther. We no longer allow partly cloudy to fool us. We know the truth about wind chill.

As you know, mighty Casey strikes out in Thayer's classic, leaving Flynn and Blake stranded and sending a saddened, joyless Mudville throng home with a loss.

I've never figured out Casey's problem: Overconfidence? Bad swing? Took his eye off the ball?

He did have one thing Central Nebraska baseball players and tennis and soccer players, golfers and track athletes don't today.

A chance to play.

George Ayoub is senior writer at The Independent.