With Spring Training underway, Opening Day can't be far behind. This year, Opening Day has more meaning than just the first game of the season. There's the ring ceremony, the raising of the banner, the first game against the Yankees since The Choke, and the Sox first game as defending World Champs.

There's also the release of Fever Pitch.

The Farrelly Brothers film based on a novel by Nick Hornby has been the center of much debate amongst Red Sox fans since the Sox won their first World Series in 86 years. As the Sox celebrated their triumph over the St Louis Cardinals on the Busch Stadium field, Fox's cameras panned to the right and focused on the film's stars, Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon, who were on the field kissing, filming a brand new ending to the movie about a hopelessly obsessed Red Sox fan.

Legions of Sox fans have not forgiven Fallon and the Farrelly Brothers for thrusting themselves into the middle of such an important and personal moment, insisting that they will not see Fever Pitch.

Me? I'll be at the theater on opening night.

I discovered Nick Hornby when I was in high school. A friend recommended I read High Fidelity and after much procrastination, I finally got around to buying a copy. Immediately, I fell in love. I always felt different in high school, as very few of my friends shared my passions for music, books, and sports. But here was a writer putting my thoughts so eloquently on paper. Over the next couple of years, I read every book Hornby ever wrote, edited, or coauthored. I saw the three movies based on his books, all of which I enjoyed thoroughly. When the news broke that another version of Fever Pitch was being made, I already knew I'd be first in line to see it.

Then I found out it was being made by a Red Sox fan - about a Red Sox fan - and my excitement reached a new level.

Fever Pitch, which has become somewhat of a bible for overzealous sports fans, is the confession of a man whose obsession with Arsenal's football team is both a blessing and a curse. Despite its damaging effect on his personal life and the amount of stress it causes him, he realizes that abandoning his passion for sports is simply not an option. There's no telling how true the movie will stay to the book, but even if the dialogue changes, the theme will not: sports are more than a hobby or a pasttime - they are a way of life.

As for altering the script to focus on a Red Sox fan in Boston instead of an Arsenal fan in England, well, it makes perfect sense. What fan base is so loyal and passionate despite such pain and suffering? The Red Sox are the Arsenal of the MLB. Hasn't every Red Sox fan said this (though not nearly as eloquently) at one time or another?

Football teams are extraordinarily inventive in the ways they find to cause their supporters sorrow. They seduce you, half-way through the season, into believing they are promotion candidates and then go the other way...always, when you think you have anticipated the worst that can happen, they come up with something new.

The fact is this: Hornby just gets it. He feels our pain. He understands our blind faith. He celebrates along with us. Just like us, he has superstitions that he follows strictly, even though he realizes how ridiculous they are.

We invest hours each day, months each year, years each lifetime in something over which we have no control; is it any wonder then, that we are reduced to creating ingenius but bizarre liturgies designed to give us the illusion that we are powerful after all, just as every primitive community has done when faced with a deep and apparently inpenetrable mystery?

So while some may hold strong to their beliefs that Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore should be punished for celebrating on the same field as the Red Sox, I'll be at the theater on opening night, enjoying the story of a man who is just like me.

I have always been accused of taking the things I love - football, of course, but also books and records - much too seriously, and I do feel a kind of anger when I hear a bad record, or when someone is lukewarm about a book that means a lot to me.