I used to love the summer. 

For years, it’s been my go-to answer for that horribly uninspired icebreaker — what’s your favorite season? — largely because of three things: the weather, no school and, of course, baseball.

Often, all three factors go hand-in-hand. The summer is perfect for baseball. Baseballs travel further in the heat, and summer break also enables more kids and families to venture to the ballpark.

However, now a college senior, I’ve fallen out of love with summer. Not only have the past few summers been grossly hot, but school’s absence has been replaced by summer jobs and mounting responsibilities.

And while I love watching and discussing baseball, writing about it for a college newspaper leaves me with no baseball games to discuss since most of the MLB season is played during summer break. 

So instead, I want this article to serve as preparation for the upcoming postseason, a manifesto encouraging you to capture and embrace the moment — something that I think makes baseball unique and disproves that lazy “boring” argument against the game. This is no easy task, but please consider something for me and continue to think about it as you read this article: Baseball is all about the build up.

The MLB season (and its 162 games per team) builds up the same way a baseball game itself does — that is, action is more dispersed than any other American sport. The minimum of nine innings in a game trumps the halves and quarters found in other sports. The MLB’s 162 games nearly doubles the NBA’s and ten folds the NFL’s.

While monoliths like the Los Angeles Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies have stood tall atop their respective divisions for the majority of the season, despite injury, their seasons have been built on moments. As Shohei Ohtani nears being the first player in MLB history to reach 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in a single season, each of his swings and leads off first base become moments fans cling to, as they hope to witness history firsthand. His season has been built on these moments, even if the end result is a foul ball or slide back into first. 

These moments, where anything is possible, only become more momentous during October. Even more granular ones, like a batter walking up to the plate, a pitcher stepping off the mound or even a player rounding the diamond (wink, wink) after a home run mean more come the postseason because they are built on smaller moments during the regular season. 

It’s up to fans to embrace these moments as their teams hunt for postseason glory.

That’s because within every moment — every road trip, series, game, inning, at-bat and pitch — lies an opportunity for the script to be flipped. And when baseball is at its best, the crowd realizes this opportunity and lives and dies with every pitch. That is what October baseball is all about. Embracing the moment and letting loose.

However, the reality of a long season is that not every pitch is a matter of life and death, and that a full 162 game season amasses a full picture of reality, not just a snippet of it. In other words, you can find the truth during regular season baseball. You get to see how good a team or player really is because of the large sample size. It means that team and player accomplishments simply mean more because talent and guts is more revealing than a 17 game schedule would allow. 

Now, this is not a recommendation for the NFL to add more games to their season. I think for the safety of football players, the fewer games the better. But as football viewership usurps baseball’s postseason viewership, remember to capture the moments, which have been built up all season long, and embrace them. I promise there’s plenty of football to watch afterwards.