Will ‘sports holidays’ some day become the norm?

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Ah, baseball’s opening day. When the first blossoms of spring fall forlornly to the first blades of green glass below.

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And when we all have the day off work to enjoy it.

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Wait! What?!

Yes, just joking. Sorry, bosses.

But the way our ever more snowflake-soaked society is going, who’d be surprised if it gets to the point in our lifetimes when we all get a stat holiday on the high holy day of our favourite sport? Or for a day of recovery afterward?

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For years, people on social media have jokingly — well, probably only half-jokingly, or not jokingly at all — lobbied to have a stat holiday moved to, for instance, the Monday after the Super Bowl. Or, in Canada, after the Grey Cup. Or some other ginormous sports event.

(If we’re going there, the vote here is for the Thursday and Friday every April when Rounds 1 and 2 of the Masters [hand on heart] are played, what with all-day TV coverage to soak up, and tinkling piano and pacifying guitar music ever in the background.)

The Major League Baseball season began today and the seamhead corners of Twitter were all atwitter at the romantic idea of it all. “You’re taking the day off from work anyway,” New York Newsday’s Neil Best began a tweet Thursday morning.

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It’s sorta like when I write about the NFL’s annual tripleheader on U.S. Thanksgiving, when I predict my NFL-fan readership again this year, on that Thursday, coincidentally, shall become ill, en masse, and call in sick.

But are we getting past the point of just joking about this?

After all, at some point, as society softens all the more, it’ll become too much to ask any of us to expect us to actually work, and concentrate, on such a justifiably distracting day, won’t it?

Which would be exactly as it is now, already, in high schools across Canada, where it has become so expected that students will skip classes on the last day before a long weekend, or end of semester, etc., that teachers never plan anything remotely important, least of all a lesson on new subject matter. And when kids in slightly more disciplined homes whine to their mean parents that they just can’t be among the nerdy few who actually go to school that day.

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Indeed, that’s become the norm at high schools, if not middle schools and upper grades of grade schools too — when the ol’ classroom DVD player gets another all-day workout.

And guess what? Today’s teenagers are the ones who’ll start running things in 10, 20 years.

Maybe the only thing as certain as the fact they’ll never, ever order a society-wide shutdown along the lines of the ones they suffered through so miserably and unfairly during the pandemic, is at some point we’ll all bygawd be at home with the boss’s permission a few times a year to watch or celebrate a high holy day of sports, or whatever else we’d have to trudge through in the ol’ days.

Maybe take the day to think about it, at any rate.

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@JohnKryk