And if you’re wondering—or if the nickname “P-Train” wasn’t obvious enough—Juan Maldonado, Pietro Deserio, Kevin Brennan and John Latella are not the names of prestigious sports recruits from my high school. They don’t partake in major NCAA Division I, II or III athletics; nor did they play a varsity sport in grades nine through 12. While CYO games may have been a different story, the “best” the group has now is Pietro, who plays rugby for Yale. The fact that I struck out Juan was no more of a historic athletic achievement than the expletive-laden mom joke he delivered to me immediately afterwards.

And that, in more than one sense, is exactly what I’m getting at.

Summer doesn’t trump all other seasons in sports because professional athletes are earning millions at the time. Nor is it special because college students are doing it in the steps necessary to becoming said professional athletes, either. The days of June through September, to me, represent just the opposite.

It’s the only time of year that boasts the honor of being best remembered in terms of a wide, and at times random, assortment of game-related anecdotes and jokes that only you and your friends will remember.

It’s like the Olympics, only more amateurish than ever intended.

It’s an unending sequence of pick-up games; inevitably “tackle” games of “touch” football; the World Series of Wiffle Ball taking place in the middle of July while the some older residents of my apartment complex are sunbathing in the area between third base and left field.

But it’s also sitting in the bleachers in Yankee Stadium on an unbelievably humid June night, yelling out the Yankee roll call, calling out to Mariano Rivera, and mocking Oakland A’s outfielder Eric Byrnes. It could also be, for some of you, taking part in some ostensibly inferior equivalent tradition in Fenway Park.

There’s a nourishing freedom in all of this, a feeling that can only come with no school on the immediate horizon. It’s an autonomy that doesn’t simply make a 95-degree New York summer tolerable, but something to be relished. It brings us troops of little kids tirelessly running through sprinklers and playing stickball and basketball, and it also gives us the non-alcohol-related courage to challenge—and thoroughly demolish—such kids in any sport we allow them to select.

In a way, it’s paradoxical. It’s surely less about the actual competition, and even less about who wins or loses. For once, the vast amount of games played aren’t about the dramatic rivalries sportswriters love to talk about. But so much of it, simultaneously, is about trash-talking, relentlessly mocking your friends, and playing, non-stop, until it’s time to go home.

I admit that I’m being a bit nostalgic here. Many of us also work in the summer—seriously cutting into time for sports, playing or watching—and I’d be foolish to begin to misrepresent the season as a utopia that swings around every few months and rids one of all kinds of bad weather, depression, and responsibility.

But sitting here in April—the pre-season season—teetering on the brink of 60 degree weather in the Boston area, it’s difficult not to stray and think of even warmer climes. It’s a trying thing, I’m finding, to take spring for what it’s worth, and enjoy the undercard as much as the main event.

When it comes down to it, it’s nothing short of a Herculean task to have to sit through clips of “Scooby Doo 2” when you know “The Girl Next Door” is right around the corner.

—Staff writer Pablo S. Torre can be reached at torre@fas.harvard.edu. His column appears on alternate Mondays.