Jeff_carter_foot
As I was shoveling 15 inches of sopping wet snow this morning, two things became clear to me: I needed to defrost my fingers, and spring can’t come soon enough.

There are very few black holes on the sporting calendar. The days before and after the baseball All-Star Game are the only two days in which you are guaranteed to have no major professional sporting events (don’t give me soccer or tennis, I’m talking about sports people care about). Yet there is an undeniable lull between the day the Eagles bow out of the playoffs and, say, the start of March Madness.

Regular-season Flyers hockey, the Sixers, and college basketball are all fine, but I think you would be hard pressed to find many folks who wouldn’t happily fast forward to March 15.

And, as I struggled to break the layer of ice below those 15 inches of snow, that’s a date I couldn’t stop thinking about: March 15.

I have a nice little five-day trip to Spring Training planned for that week, and thoughts of sitting under the Tiki Bar watching Cliff Lee and his ironic chin long toss across the vast expanse of Kentucky Blue Grass were running through my head. It’s a sight many fans take in each March, one that symbolizes the unofficial start of spring, summer, warm weather – whatever you want to call it.

Read the rest at Philly Sports Daily.