Welcome to Make Your Own Fun Day

So it's April now, baseball season, and in my dreams it is 1971 and Steve Blass is pitching and Manny Sanguillen is catching, and Roberto the Magnificent is throwing that guy out at third, on the fly, from deepest right field.

It's April, and down in Augusta, Ga., it is 1986 and the azaleas are blooming and Jack is taking that leisurely stroll up the 18th fairway, the place pouring out its love on his doddering old head.

In my dreams, it's April, and Havlicek is stealing the ball. It's May, and Mario's taking the checkers at Indy. It's July, and Borg is lashing one last sizzler down the line while McEnroe, utterly spent, falls to the Centre Court grass and lies unmoving.

The imagination is our playground now, with all the real playgrounds gone dark. Your memories are your high-def TV with theater seating and surroundsound, and you enhance them by cruising YouTube or flipping on your actual TV and watching replays of old NCAA Tournament games, old World Series games, old wars between Bird and Magic, Sayers and Nitschke, Ali and Frazier.

Me?

Indy gearhead that I am, I've taken to watching highlight packages of ancient Indianapolis 500s. Here's Mario winning. Here's Parnelli Jones in the STP turbine, breaking with four laps to run. Here's Lloyd Ruby breaking, endlessly, endlessly.

Al Unser and the Johnny Lightning Special. Jimmy Clark and that green Lotus-Powered-By-Ford. Mark Donohue and the navy Sunoco McLaren, No. 66 always in our hearts and minds.

I've got an endless supply of these, are at least 103 of them. But then I've got an endless supply of hours right now, being 65 and mostly retired and with nowhere to go but the grocery for who knows how long.

Before long, I'll be doing what my good friend and former colleague, the esteemed Hall of Famer Steve Warden, did on his Facebook page recently. Said he didn't know what anyone else was going to do, but he was going to watch baseball. And then posted that wonderful clip of Jack Nicholson calling an imaginary World Series in "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest."

Yessir. That's about where we are now.