The Padres are back. Baseball is back. And with Spring come – for me, at least – dreams of glory.

A lot of us never outgrow it: The fantasy of being a sports hero. You’d think that by now, a number (never mind which number) of decades after what had to be my athletic peak, such as it was, I’d have abandoned the various middle-of-the-night, insomnia-inspired mini-series in which I’m a 20-game winner, a Wimbledon finalist … okay, champion. A Wimbledon champion.

This may be divulging a little too much, but my sky castles are so well thought out, so precisely designed and engineered, that I can tell you not only the official Won-Lost record for my first few years with the Padres (3-1, 11-8, 15-9, 17-8, 20-7), but my I-wish physique as well (6’1’’, 175). My tennis-player build is the same, my record even more impressive: Two Wimbledons, one U.S. Open, one Australian Open. (No French Open, though – my powers of imagination bog down in never-played-on-it clay.)

Fortunately, I’ve managed – so far – to contain these pipe dreams to the late-night, early-morning hours of desperation (“If I can go to sleep in the next 15 minutes, I’ll still get 5½ hours”), where, having been screened on my brainpan so many hundreds (thousands?) of times, they act as a knockout potion: After a while, they literally bore me to sleep.

But while Springtime refreshes these fantasies, at the same time it locks them securely in that castle. Because every year I go to Indian Wells in Palm Desert to see tennis in person and very up-close. And, standing at a practice court watching a professional tennis player ranked, say, #35 in the world, it takes me half of an eyeblink to be reminded that these people play on a level that is so far beyond anything I could ever approach that the only justifiable excuse for my fantasies is a drug that can be traced directly to Owsley Stanley. Television, I want you to know, gives you no freaking idea, no freaking idea, just how unimaginably fast these people are, what mind-bogglingly good shape they’re in, and how otherworldly is their nanosecond timing.

About four years ago I was at Indian Wells watching Fernando González hit on one of the practice courts. You may have never heard of him, but he was one of the best (“was” because he’s 29 now, old for a tennis pro). And here’s the only way I know how to describe what I saw: He cracked about 30 straight forehands, and every single time he just blasted the living crap out of the ball. It’s beyond all reason, how hard he hit every single shot. Now, admittedly, Gonzo (we go way back) was known for his howitzer-class forehand, but still: What he was doing appeared superhuman. It was impossible, as I understand the interplay of physics and even the outer reaches of what Homosapiens is capable of achieving.

And then this happened: González’s hitting partner returned one of his shots not to his right, for a forehand, but to his left. Now, what one does in this case is either 1) rotate left and hit a backhand, or 2) scurry to the left – around the ball – in order to be in position to hit another forehand. Gonza`lez did neither. He barely moved. Instead, he lackadaisically (it was very hot, he’d been out there a long time) reached around and hit the ball behind his back … but that doesn’t say it: He cracked the ball, he pulverized the ball, he hit that ball, behind his back, harder and cleaner and more purely than I’ve ever hit a ball in my life,and I’ve been playing a solid mediocre tennis for a long time.

I think about that sometimes, at around 3:30 or 4 a.m., after I’ve drilled a match-point, cross-court forehand past the diving Nadal, or left Albert Pujols twisted in a double overhand knot with a two-strike split-change. And then I remember that, yeah, I used to dream that someday I could fly, too.