No one likes the offseason.  Well, no one who’s anyone likes the offseason.  It’s too long.  It’s windy and cold.  Nothing happens.  It hurts to throw and catch.  And, again, it’s cold.

This offseason in particular, it seems, is really taking its sweet time.  Maybe it’s something that always happens; when you go to a World Series, the offseason the year after always feels slower by comparison.  I wouldn’t know; the last time I had two consecutive offseason, one coming after a World Series appearance, to compare, I was four years old, too young even to know who the Mets’ Opening Day starter in 1982 was.

But regardless, we’ve got one clunker of an offseason to get through, so we’ve got to get down to it.  Watch some highlights.  Read some books.  Even listen to some old radio calls, assuming they’re available (they’re not available on mobile devices, as I discovered in cruel fashion on the treadmill a few days ago).

And, from time to time, check back on your progress with the Shea Bridge Report Official Opening Day 2017 Countdown Clock.  Give it a look now, and then in the New Year, and then mid-January, and suddenly, before you know it, it’s Pitchers and Catchers, and there’s no need for a countdown clock anymore because we’re absolutely absorbed in such urgent Spring Training details as Matt Harvey’s hairstyle and, invariably, animals of some sort.

The point, if there is a point, is that the offseason will pass – temporally quantifiably.  Already, since I created the countdown, we’ve shaved a good few minutes off it.  We’ll continue to do so – after all, it’s almost the Winter Meetings, which will signal that the worst part of the offseason has ended – and before we know it, it will be early on the morning of April 3rd, 2017, and we’ll be up and rearin’ to go, counting down the minutes and the seconds until we can once again turn the radio on after a commercial and hear, “From Citi Field, in Flushing, New York…”

The countdown won’t matter then.  In months leading up to then, which is to say the months immediately ahead of us, it will matter only marginally more.  But it’s got orange and blue lettering, and if memories of the orange and blue can’t get us through this long haul of an offseason, I don’t know what else can.

And if you’ve missed the previous links, the countdown can be found here.