Hi. My name is Jim, and I’m addicted to sports.

There, I said it. I have no problem admitting it. I love sports and spend quite a bit of time watching them. Many times my schedule revolves around when certain games will be played.

Now before you book me a room at the Whitey Ford Clinic, allow me to explain myself. For someone who follows sports closely, they become somewhat of a ritual. Instead of summer, fall, winter and spring, the seasons might be seen as baseball, football and basketball.

While I’ll watch just about any sport once, the three that I follow with the most vigor are baseball, football and college basketball. While I love football, it only is on once a week, which makes a bit of a lull from Tuesday to Friday. Baseball is on every day during the season, and college basketball has enough games going on throughout the course of the week to keep me more than interested, so those are the two sports that garner most of my passion.

Lucky for me, very little time goes by in the course of a calendar year where I have to go without baseball or college basketball. The baseball season ends around late October or early November, and the first college basketball exhibition games begin in November.

There is usually always one day of the year when all is well with my sports world, and I can watch both of my favorite sports in the same day. This year, that day was Monday. As is the case with most years in my memory, there is one Monday that doubles as Opening Day of the baseball season and the day of the NCAA Tournament championship game. This day allows me to make a smooth transition from the college basketball season to the baseball season. Throw in The Masters Golf Tournament this weekend and you get one heck of a week for sports addicts like me.

These two sports make up a cycle for me over the course of the year. Just as the excitement of crowning a champion in one of the sports reaches its climax, in comes the anticipation of a new season in the other.

So, we now move on to the events of the present day. As I was watching Florida dismantle UCLA in the NCAA Championship game, capping off a great NCAA Tournament but a thoroughly boring Final Four, I was nevertheless excited, after having seen my St. Louis Cardinals beat the Philadelphia Phillies 13-5 earlier in the day.

As soon as CBS’ traditional NCAA Tournament highlight reel, made famous by Luther Vandross’ recording of “One Shining Moment,” was over, effectively ending the college basketball season for me, I began to excitedly anticipate hearing Busch Stadium organist Ernie Hays play “Here Comes The King,” also known as the Anheuser-Busch theme song, next Monday at the first Cardinals home opener at the new Busch Stadium.

We are now at the beginning of the long baseball season. As a native St. Louisan, the Cardinals’ home opener attracts at least as much excitement in this city as a major holiday like Christmas. If you really think about it, both of these events result in very large numbers of people wearing red, so maybe it makes more sense than you would think. To further the “Baseball as Religion in St. Louis” argument, baseball season definitely has a greater level of awareness than a long religious season like Ordinary Time. There have been years in which the Cardinals home opener has fallen on the day after Easter, which could lead to some interesting “Spring Training as Lent” discussions as well.

Seriously, as a dedicated Catholic, I am somewhat kidding-but there really are some parallels. That’s how much the Cardinals mean to St. Louis.

I’ve never lived in any other cities and so I cannot come to any accurate conclusions about how other cities around the country approach opening day. For the fans of a certain National League baseball team located on the north side of Chicago at the corner of Clark and Addison, it’s probably the hope of the possibility that each new season presents a chance to end talk of 1908 or Billy Goats. Until the past two seasons, similar ideas were probably felt by fans of the Boston Red Sox and Chicago White Sox, who both ended long World Series droughts by winning baseball’s biggest prize in 2004 and 2005, respectively. For New York Yankees fans, I guess it’s a chance to add to the legacy of the most successful franchise in American professional sports. For fans of any team, one thing remains the same when play begins on Opening Day: Everyone is in first place for at least one day.

So, if you still think I might require some form of treatment to deal with this sports addiction of mine, can you at least book me a room with a good cable TV?