LITTLE ROCK – For a baseball fan, there’s life and there’s the off-season. Life returned to these parts at 7:10 p.m. on a fine Thursday evening in flowering April. That’s when the opening pitch was thrown of the Arkansas Travelers’ first home game of the season – against the Midland (Tex.) Rockhounds.

Let a painterly writer like John Updike write rapturously about that “lyric little bandbox of a ball park” up in Boston called Fenway in prose as high-priced as tickets to a Red Sox game. He never got to see the little jewel that is Dickey-Stephens Park in its perfect setting – alongside the Arkansas River, backlit by the skyline of a just-right-sized American city on the cusp between Upper and Lower South.

There is a special brightness to everything on the opening night of the season at a minor-league ballpark as the crowd begins to jell and the sense of anticipation slowly swells. It hits you as you pass through the gate and get your first glimpse of that green, green field of dreams. So familiar, yet so fresh and untouched. Everything shines: the signs in the outfield, the bright white baselines. The stars shine bright deep in the heart of … the Texas League.

All is as it should be: It’s spring, the stars and planets move to the music of the spheres, and the geometry of the game remains perfect. Home plate is a pentagon, the infield a diamond. Theoretically a batter could keep fouling off pitches without limit, and a tie game could go on forever, the innings continuing into infinity. Baseball is an Einsteinian phenomenon: Time and space merge. Here war, famine, pestilence, death and all that transient editorial grist have been left behind. You’re in clockless baseball time now, floating free.

But outside the ballpark, time has taken its revenge. References to baseball as the national pastime are now made in the past tense, or ironically. The power and force of football, with its air of gladiatorial combat, have triumphed over the old-time grace of this most American game. Just as the old republic has given way to a mass democracy, a sense of place to globalization, and the dream of splendid isolation to the dictates of empire. It’s a story as old as Rome.

Something of ineffable beauty and grace at the kernel of American life will be lost if this game is ever completely eclipsed. Reason will have fled to brutish beasts, most of them in the stands. The very intricacy of this most American game testifies to the Republic’s continuing devotion, however strained, to law, ritual, tradition, a measured pace. It is a game made for conservatives.

I remember the last time I visited Richard S. Arnold, an Arkansas jurist who, along with Learned Hand, was surely the finest judge never to have served on the Supreme Court of the United States. He was confined to his hospital bed, a Prometheus bound by IV tubes. But if his body was taking its leave, Richard Arnold’s ever-nimble mind, which age could not wither nor custom stale, was completely absorbed in … watching a baseball game on television.

“Do you like baseball?” he asked me. A rhetorical question if there ever was one. Whereupon he made sure I got a copy of a classic little essay out of a law review, “The Common Law Origins of the Infield Fly Rule.” A nation so constitutionally attached to rules and their interpretation, even in its play, has not yet lost its genius for continuity.

Baseball may be fading as the national pastime, but for one glorious spring night, as you climb off the streetcar in North Little Rock, Ark., and set your mouth for the first beer and hot dog, life has returned and the years drop away. Some things are still the same, even better for still being there after all these years. There are still four bases in the infield, kids in the bleachers, and ham-handed infielders.

Oh, yes, the game itself. Between the Travs’ Laurel-and-Hardy fielding and the Rockhounds’ hitting, it was a rout: 11 to 1. But it simplifies matters greatly if you’re the kind of fan who just roots for the team in the field. That way, local passions are kept at bay, and don’t obscure the grace of the game. You can have your dramatic home runs; give me the classic, balletic double play.

But there’ll be another game the next night. And sure enough, the Travs would come back to win it 3 to 0. Or as Earl Weaver, legendary manager of the Baltimore Orioles, once told a critic who wanted to know why baseball wasn’t any faster: “This ain’t a football game, we do this every day.” That’s the great consolation of a long season. If you don’t do well one day, there’s always tomorrow. In that respect, it’s not unlike writing a newspaper column.

As with American history, there is something assuring about the continuity of the game. Every year the season begins as hopeful as an Appalachian spring, becomes as long as a Southern summer, and its end can be as poignant as a New England fall. So long as there’s cricket, there’ll always be an England. So long as there’s baseball, there’ll be an America.

God, I love this game!

God, I love this country.

© 2010 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.