Well, okay, so it’s not really a game; more of a seven-inning scrimmage against the Boston College baseball team, which is down to take its annual pasting from the experienced teams along the Sun Coast and Alligator Alley (Florida college teams get to play and practice year-round, which hardly seems fair) before swinging north to play under usually cloudy skies and in cutting winds that make fifty degrees feel like thirty. But they are naturally juiced to be playing against the big boys, and in front of an audience that numbers in the thousands instead of the hundreds or—sometimes, early on—the mere dozens.

City of Palms Park in Fort Myers is Fenway’s sunnier-tempered little brother. The aisles are wider, the concession lines are shorter, the prices are saner, the pace is slower, and the mood is laid-back. One hears the occasional cry of You suck!—these are Boston fans after all—but they are isolated, and often draw disapproving looks. This is a mellow crowd, and hey, why not? We’re still in first place—along with the Yankees, and the Orioles, and even the Devil Rays, who dwell in their somehow dingy dome up the road in Tampa—and all things are possible. Curse? What curse? As if to underline this, a grinning bald guy holds up a sign for Pokey Reese. OKEY DOKEY, POKEY, it reads.

It’s an afternoon for saying hello to old friends from previous springs going back—can it be?—six years, now; everyone from the parking-lot attendant and the elderly security guard outside the elevator going up to the offices and the press boxes to a laid-back Larry Lucchino, who wants to know if I’m over my bout of pneumonia. And Stewart O’Nan is here, looking exactly as he did last October during the American League Championship Series against the Yankees.