Well, as it turns out, contrary to what we’ve always been told, sometimes the sun really doesn’t come out tomorrow. Sometimes The Morning After dawns gray and chilly and ugly, as it did Monday in New York City, the first day without an active baseball team in exactly 200 days. It was an appropriate bit of stagecraft. 

“It’s an awful day,” Aaron Boone had said past midnight, well after Sunday night had bled into Monday morning, shortly after the curtain fell on one of the greatest, grandest baseball seasons New York has ever known, one that ended far too quickly and far too early no matter where the baseball investments in your sporting portfolio lie. 

“It stings,” Boone continued. “It hurts. 

“The ending, as I’ve said before, is cruel.” 

Buck Showalter had used the exact same word exactly two weeks earlier, when he was feeling exactly the same way Boone was after the Mets’ season came crashing down against the Padres, on a night when Mets fans felt the same depths of baseball despair that Yankees fans are now feeling. 

“This sport is so gratifying and so many great things happen,” Showalter had said, 9 ½ miles on the other side of the RFK Bridge, the other end of baseball New York. “It’s just cruel too at times like this.” 

On other Mornings After, in other years, the pall would last a while because there would be nothing left to pick up the slack or the spirits of the locals. The drive past Citi Field on Northern Boulevard would be dreadful; being stuck in traffic on the Deegan as it inched past Yankee Stadium would be brutal. 

Especially knowing what Minute Maid Park on Crawford Street in downtown Houston is going to sound like Friday and Saturday. Especially knowing what Citizens Bank Park just off Broad Street in South Philadelphia will feel like, and look like, a few days after that. There is no shame in copping to a bad case of October Envy. It’s real. It burns. It throbs, like a dull toothache. 

But this is a different kind of Morning After in New York City, far different from what we’ve been used to for so long. You wake up and look at the NFL standings and see that, no, it really isn’t a figment of your imagination: the Giants are really 6-1. The Jets are really 5-2. Just as baseball vanishes we actually have a football season to jump into with both feet. 

We have the Jets welcoming New England and Buffalo, their forever AFC East rivals, to MetLife Stadium over in North Jersey the next two weeks. We have the Giants, a narrow half-game behind the Eagles atop the NFC East, playing each week with more swagger, more assertiveness, more confidence. We have the certainty of important football games in November and the likelihood of essential ones in December. 

However much of a through-the-looking-glass feel this all has to it — and, perhaps, remembering how splendid the first six months of baseball season were before giving way to the melancholy of October — there may still be a wait-and-see attitude among the faithful. But that sure beats a playing-out-the-string-and-waiting-for-the-draft posture eight days a week. 

And there’s more: There are the Rangers, who hit a soft patch of ice in their last game against the Blue Jackets but sure look to have the firepower and the star power to make another serious run at the Cup this year. There’s the Nets, so delightfully dysfunctional but still employing one of the rarest basketball talents alive in Kevin Durant, and any night you spend watching Durant play is a good night. 

And there are the Knicks, dormant for the better part of two decades, who really do seem intent on making you watch them every night because they seem intent on honoring — in style if not yet in talent — all the better angels of their history, a hit-the-open-man legacy that you can already tell makes Clyde Frazier smile as he watches courtside. 

(And don’t sleep on the Johnnies, who may well join the Knicks in sparking a hoops renaissance at the Garden this winter; there’s more optimism on Utopia Parkway than there’s been in years. Oh, and don’t forget about NYCFC, two wins away from an MLS repeat …) 

It is a cruel day, and the day complied, spitting rain periodically, DFAing the sun, locking the doors on baseball for the next 5 ½ months. But baseball will be back, on the other side of winter. You ache now, you curse the Yankees shortcomings and slander the Mets pratfall. You’ll be back too, soon enough. Only 113 days till pitchers and catchers.