The Major League Baseball season started the night before last.

That was once a major event in the lives of a significant number of Americans. But even here in the heart of die-hard Red Sox Nation, a surprisingly large bloc of otherwise rational sports fans, which is perhaps a contradiction in terms, barely acknowledged the annual starting date of a sport which not all that long ago was unquestionably America’s favorite.

Baseball was literally and figuratively the country’s “National Pastime” for at least the first two-thirds of the 20th century, yet 15 years into the 21st it’s become marginalized, barely noticed until the conclusion of the basketball and hockey playoffs, and even then only followed with any hint of passion until the ubiquitous, insidious, and fiendishly well-marketed National Football League begins its season each year around Labor Day.

At this time of year, many longtime baseball fans wonder how and why so many younger sports-obsessed individuals follow NCAA men’s and women’s basketball, the Masters golf tournament, NASCAR, and other lesser athletic endeavors with far greater ardor than they do the game that produced truly influential cultural and historical icons like Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, and Roberto Clemente. Totally ignoring professional sports in order to pay closer attention to international nuclear arms limitation talks, potentially life-altering climate change developments, or grandstanding politicians introducing legislation intended to curb equal rights for certain people is understandable, even admirable. But a New Englander more concerned with a first-round Memphis Grizzlies playoff game than with how the Red Sox are faring is most assuredly neither of those things.

As bewildered as veteran baseball watchers are with younger sports fans, Twittering, Facebooking, selfie-taking, instant-gratification-addicted members of the “Me Generation” can’t be blamed for being equally curious about why so many venerable types habitually obsess over a three-hour game which contains precious little actual action, and that moves at a snail’s pace to boot.

When my chronological peers and I were growing up, TV sets had three channels at most. Computers, personal or otherwise, didn’t exist. Leisure hours weren’t any harder to come by than they are today; in fact, they likely were more plentiful. But the imagination required to fill that spare time had to be self-generated, rather than artificially created by some electronic device(s). From what I recall of the 1960s and 1970s (and what was presumably the case in the decades before that as well), nearly all of what America’s male youth did with its spare time took place outdoors, and was physical in nature. (Tangential thought: the rise of fast-food restaurants isn’t the only reason America’s obesity rates are skyrocketing.) We had to make our own fun, and much of that involved actually playing the sports that, if we were lucky, we got to watch live once in a great while on a fuzzy, black-and-white video screen.

Marketing was also a part of the equation, although the baseball industry’s efforts in that regard half a century or so ago seem quaint by today’s standards. One tiny but nonetheless significant portion of selling the game during my childhood took place on the back of cereal boxes.

Because my mother had a random yet uncanny knack for bringing home containers of Post Toasties with at least one Detroit Tiger trading card on the back I began rooting for the Motor City’s American League team. Today I sometimes forget which days of the week my children have concerts or soccer practices, but those two-and-a-half-inch by three-and-a-half-inch cardboard images of Rocky Colavito, Al Kaline, Jake Wood, Dick Brown, Bill Bruton, Don Mossi, Steve Boros, and Chico Fernandez are still burned into my memory. Thank goodness Mom didn’t purchase boxes featuring numerous members of the Milwaukee Braves, Washington Senators, or Kansas City Athletics. Then I’d have been stuck rooting for a defunct team a few years later. Who knows what that would’ve done to my psyche?

Cereal box baseball cards disappeared after 1963, but by that time the sport had hooked me, and, as it turns out, had done so permanently despite my initially sporadic and later more determined efforts to outgrow it.

Trading cards on the back of cereal boxes ought to make a comeback, but when they do they ought to feature societal impact makers instead of grossly overpaid professional athletes. It used to cost at least two really good cards, like a Kaline and a Colavito, to swap for a superstar like Willie Mays, and if the guy you were trading with drove a hard bargain you’d have to throw in a Norm Cash to complete the transaction.

I wonder if packaging a Rosa Parks and a Thomas Edison together would get me an Abraham Lincoln, or if I’d need to add a Jonas Salk to close the deal?

— Andy Young teaches in Kennebunk and lives in Cumberland.

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