And you thought March Madness was about basketball.

It was until the Democrats came along with Barack Obama’s preacher damning America and the angry ex-Marine James Carville calling Bill Richardson “Judas” for shunning the Clintons and endorsing Obama.

Never mind the NCAA Final Four. In the brackets that really count, Clinton is the early favorite in Pennsylvania on April 22, leading into subregional final showdowns with Obama in Indiana and North Carolina in early May.

But we may be in the baseball pennant race before the Democrats pick their champ. If the party luminaries and assorted bigwigs known as superdelegates can’t decide on a nominee in June, then it’s on to a Denver convention in late August.

All of this leads us to a soothing point of diversion. It’s baseball season. The season of America’s national pastime, and forever so.

The pastoral game is too slow, too ponderous, too spread out, too boring – yet somehow it thrives in the age of instant gratification. It’s become the ultimate counterculture sport, chess on a field in a time when literally a blood sport – ultimate fighting – is the newest spectator rage. Baseball will never supersede football on raw competition, basketball on glamour, auto racing on spectacle or pro wrestling on camp. But baseball has nothing to prove. It is the sport of Americana.

If not, why do they write songs about Joe DiMaggio but not Dick Butkus? Why is “put me in, coach” about playing center field? Why is Jackie Robinson the iconic hero of race and sports? What in the sporting world said more about 20th-century America than the Negro Leagues of baseball? Is there a more elegant athletic memory than a Satchel Paige windup?

The new season sprang forth last weekend in a brand new stadium in southeast Washington, D.C., a neighborhood hoping the nation’s pastime will reverse years of the nation’s neglect. Washington is a place of derision in this season of politics, but at least for one weekend it was home to promise and renewal as the hometown Nats took the field.

Pro baseball hopes feel-good stories like this will make us forget the steroid shame of the past year. The players and owners that seem bent on screwing up the game are invariably rescued by the hope and human story lines of wide-eyed rookies taking on the Bigs, of injured veterans fighting through the pain for one last chance.

You can’t understand baseball in the modern context until you’ve heard the great George Carlin compare it with football.

Football, the comedian says, is played on a gridiron, a battlefield. Baseball is played on a diamond in a park.

Baseball, Carlin observes, begins in the “season of new life.” Football starts in the fall, “when everything’s dying.”

And finally, Carlin says, football success depends upon “short bullet passes” and “long bombs” and a “sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the defensive line.”

“In baseball the object is to go home!” Carlin proclaims. “And to be safe! I hope I’ll be safe at home!”