How important is a full baseball season? What’s the difference between 162 games and, say, 140?

The answer will reveal itself through the end of this month, with Monday serving as Opening Day for the Most Vital Parleying in Major League Baseball history.

In Florida on Monday, some players, some owners and their representatives will huddle, continuing their efforts to complete a new collective bargaining agreement. Both sides have vowed to meet every day this week, and they could easily run through the weekend and beyond, with Feb. 28 serving as a common-sense deadline to hold the actual Opening Day on its scheduled date of March 31 — although there realistically exists a few days’ leeway to play all 162 even if the season does not start on the last day of March.

It is so vital because baseball, like virtually everything on the planet besides professional football, finds itself amid an existential crisis, trying to find its place in this rapidly changing world, walking the thinnest tightrope to somehow honor its rich history, recognize society’s changes, reward innovation and appeal to youngsters all at once. It already swung and missed by delaying spring training, the first exhibition games pushed back from Feb. 26 to no earlier than March 5, and a curtailing of the games that matter would hurt all the more.

Now, having written that, neither side has behaved with any urgency whatsoever. Commissioner Rob Manfred instituted a lockout on Dec. 2, with the stated intention to “jump-start the negotiations,” and then his side, having changed the playing field, sat on its hands for six weeks. The owners’ proposals carry the feel of cubic zirconia; they may carry a shine upon first glance, yet they don’t age well upon deeper inspection.

The players, meanwhile, often don’t seem as out for a deal as out for revenge after getting absolutely mauled in the 2016 Basic Agreement (so much so, you wonder whether the owners would have been better off taking their foot off the gas in the interests of future agreements). They’re entitled to ask for whatever they desire, and shoot, workers deserve whatever they can get. You gotta get it, though. You must outwork and outsmart your adversaries/partners. Moral high ground doesn’t naturally prevail. And the players want an awful lot at the moment.

Hence we find ourselves here. Monday will mark the seventh bargaining session on core economic issues, the sixth in person, and to reach back to football, they’re about on their own 20-yard line.

How badly do they want to make up 80 yards over eight days? That ties directly into the key question: How much do they really care about the opening month? Once you get past the glory and joy of Opening Day, April baseball turns into a sinkhole. It’s cold in many places (and colder even in warm places), making stoppages and postponements more likely. The kids still go to school, inhibiting families’ desire to go to the ballpark. Naturally, the players themselves by and large don’t love playing in front of smaller crowds in Arctic conditions.

Of course, you can’t blow off April in a vacuum, the owners giving up revenue and the players giving up paychecks, and just resume in May as if nothing happened. When Manfred described losing regular-season games as “a disastrous outcome for this industry,” he surely meant the badwill it would create at a time when this sport needs the opposite.

How much does that matter to these folks? Can the owners appreciate the players’ anger and design a more appealing package, the starting point being major moves to their proposed luxury-tax threshold? Can the players accept that they can’t necessarily counter a blowout with another blowout?

Simple questions, high-stakes answers. Get ready for a rousing week of off-the-field action when the action already should be on the field.