Steve Christilaw: How did it get so late so soon?

Where does the time go?

That is a lament you come to once you reach a certain age.

When you’re young, it feels as if time will never pass. Unless it’s the summer vacation that races past and before you know it, it’s time to go back to school.

And yet, even when the minutes and the hours, the days and the weeks, the months and the years can sometimes drag themselves out, the time still races past.

I spent a lovely Sunday night with my grandkids at the movies only to be smacked in the face with a trailer hailing a 30th anniversary reissue of Tim Burton’s first “Batman” movie and its sequels – even the one with George Clooney.

None of my movie-going companions was alive when Michael Keaton first uttered the line “I’m Batman.”

To add insult to injury I was reminded that, after more than four decades, the original “Star Wars” saga comes to a close this Christmas.

How did this all happen (not the grandkids, I know how they happened)?

Really? I know it happened “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away … ” But THAT long ago? THAT far, far away?

“Time is the greatest distance between two places,” Tennessee Williams wrote.

There are reminders of that distance all around.

Two games into the baseball season, Ichiro retired as a Seattle Mariner.

In my mind it was still April when, in his eighth game since coming to Major League Baseball from Japan, Ichiro fielded a hard single from Ramon Hernandez and fired a laser beam to third base to get Terrance Long – a play that has since come to be known as “The Throw.”

But that April was in 2001.

After being cut by the Seattle Seahawks, Doug Baldwin retired after nine seasons in the NFL.

Seems like just yesterday he was a rookie out of Stanford with a huge chip on his shoulder who set out to prove the NFL Draft experts they were wrong. And boy, did he.

Of course, I still remember sitting in the bleachers at the Kingdome watching a young rookie third baseman taking batting practice and admiring both his work ethic and his swing – the first of many, many times I admired that work ethic and incredible swing.

And now, July 21, Edgar Martinez will be inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

It doesn’t seem that long ago.

Careers come and go so fast. Before you know it, the players you come to admire are making the hard decision to leave the big stage with a graceful exit.

Trust me, the closer you get to that moment in time, the harder it is to affect grace.

I don’t know about you, but it felt like it took forever to go from being a freshman (we called them ninth-graders back in my day) to my senior year of high school.

The years since? They’ve rolled past faster than pennies turn over on a gas pump.

Next week begins the final sprint of another high school sports season.

Seems like just yesterday we were battling the smoke from another summer of wildfires as fall sports began their practices. And it had to have been this morning when the spring season was thrown for a tizzy by a late wintry blast.

Wasn’t it?

As Dr. Seuss put it: “How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before June. My goodness how time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?”

When it all comes down to it, the greatest proof that time is relative is this simple contrast. Compare the minute you spend desperately waiting for an open seat in the restroom with the minute you spend in pain waiting for a doctor to arrive.

It’s the same minute; the same 60 seconds.

When you make your living writing on a deadline, you gain a great appreciation for just how relentless those 60-second intervals can be.

So we mark the time as it flies past. We put up signposts for future reference – if for no other reason than to jog our memory the next time we pass this way.

We can’t leave it all to memory – those get clouded as we go.

And we must always remember the words of Groucho Marx, quoting Anthony G. Oettinger: “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”