Opening Day carries a seriously heavy symbolic load. For those who don’t subscribe to astronomical calendars, it’s the true first day of spring. For teams, it’s a blank-slate renewal until reality sets in. For fans, it means the welcome end of a long, cold stretch of watching inferior sports. For Major League Baseball, it’s a chance to display patriotism and support for the troops — wait, that’s basically every game now.

For the Cardinals, this year’s Opening Day really couldn’t have been any more iconic. The schedule lords selected them to open the season in Cincinnati, the traditional first game of the baseball season…except for those games in Australia…and the Sunday night game…and the six games that started before it on Monday. But there was still a parade, at least.

On the field, the Cardinals’ two leaders were basically all they needed, as Adam Wainwright turned in his typical effort/flaw-less big-game performance, and Yadier Molina popped a homer off recurring villain Johnny Cueto for the game’s only run. It was modern-day Cardinals baseball purified to a caricature.

But after the stadiums put the bunting back in storage and the grounds crew mows away the elaborate outfield design, there’s still an exhausting 161 more games to be played. And nobody really wants to talk about it, but there’s a pretty steep drop-off in enthusiasm between Opening Day and the game that follows. Turns out, in many baseball cities, “spring” is sort of a theoretical concept until late May or so. In a bunch of stadiums, the attendance for game two is a third or a quarter of the previous game’s. And even the most zealous fan starts to remember that baseball — more than any other sport — is poorly defined by single moments or even single games. The season’s story is constructed like a mosaic, and Opening Day is just a colored tile.

For the Cardinals and Reds, that anti-climax was multiplied; first by the weird tradition of a mid-series off-day at the start of the year for no apparent reason, and second by that familiar demon, midwestern April weather. Appetite re-whetted by the tense pitcher’s duel of Opening Day? Tough, MLB’s going to make you wait 48 hours for the follow-up. And then another couple hours, thanks to a dumb storm. Oh, and for an encore, game 3 will be on at the convenient-for-nobody time of 11:30 in the goddamn morning, except it’s going to be pushed back four hours by an even longer rain delay. Suckers.

By the time game two finally started, the giddiness of Opening Day was already a distant memory. Sure, the Wacha vs. Cingrani duel was barely-legal pitcher porn, but with some of the excitement siphoned off by its rerun of the previous game’s one-nil. On one hand, there’s a thrill to watching dominant pitchers at their best. On the other hand, those performances also make the game feel almost automated, with the few balls actually put in play fielded with minimal effort and enthusiasm. If you managed to stay up until the end, you were rewarded with the thrill of a single-single-bunt-IBB-single walkoff sequence.

At least Thursday’s game appeared to be chock full of baseball weirdness, with Jon Jay misadventures in the field and on the basepaths, Matt Adams losing a foul ball battle to a first-row Reds fan-bro and beating the lefty shift, and the first non-HR instant replay in Cardinals history, over a truly ridiculous outfield play. All of which was made even more nonsensically surreal by relying on occasional workday bursts of Mike Shannon to explain the circumstances, when he wasn’t talking about pleasure cruises on tugboats(?!?).

If all of the above sounds pretty jaded for April 3rd, I won’t dispute it. But if anything, the schedule and the rain and the cold bats just sped up the usual regression from Opening Day baseball-binge mania to the six-month-long steady drone of the sport, always present in the background like tinnitus. Baseball isn’t appointment television, it’s background noise to fill the bleary hours between my kid’s bedtime and my own, or the short pauses between day-job obligations. For all its greatness, Opening Day is a lie, a stoner-brained version of baseball where every little thing is special and super interesting. A baseball season isn’t constant, non-stop fun and entertainment, it’s hard work, for players and fans alike. I’m so glad it’s back.