TORONTO — This is a day to let the prose run purple, especially this day, especially in this sporting year. This is Opening Day, see, and it really doesn’t matter where you intend on spending this secular holy day of obligation — living room, saloon, ballpark, work cubicle — it will feed you and fulfill you, nurture you and nourish you.

Baseball is back, and those three words have never felt more wonderful to say. So say them again, slowly this time:

Baseball …

Is …

Back …

“I think it’s a day to be celebrated and appreciated,” Aaron Boone said, on the eve of his debut as the 26th manager in the history of the Yankees. “You just want to take a step back and appreciate getting to put a major league uniform on.”

Boone, of course, comes from a regal baseball family, one whose Opening Days wearing major league uniforms go all the way back to 1949, when his grandfather, Ray, broke camp with the world-champion Cleveland Indians. So, yes, it is an annual renewal for the men who play and manage these games.

But it is every bit as important for those of us who watch, who care, whose moods rise and fall with winning streaks and losing streaks, who suffer and bleed during ninth-inning collapses, who quiver with glee during extra-inning rallies. The offseason can be a cold, cruel time, and some are colder and crueler than others.

The Yankees have been absent since Oct. 21 — since Lance McCullers induced Greg Bird to loft a lazy fly to center field, ending the seventh game of the American League Championship Series with a 4-0 win for the eventual champion Astros. The Mets have been gone since Oct. 1, when Gavin Cecchini grounded out to the Phillies’ J.P. Crawford, mercifully ending an 11-0 loss and a 70-92 season that really started to go south within weeks of them heading north.

“I’m ready to get the ball rolling on this 2018 campaign,” said Noah Syndergaard, whose injury helped hasten the Mets’ demise in the 2017 campaign, and who will be the one to officially bring baseball back to us when he fires an inevitable 99-mph fastball at the Cardinals’ Dexter Fowler just past 1:10 p.m. Thursday at Citi Field.

“We’re going out there to play classic Mets baseball.”

Really, around New York, we’ll take any version of baseball we can get, especially after the nuclear winter that visited every other team that calls Gotham home. The Jets and Giants combined to win eight games, turning football season into an endless slog. The Knicks and the Nets have spent the better part of six months barely trying to convince a basketball-loving city not to hate basketball.

The Islanders were eliminated from playoff contention last weekend. The Rangers were knocked out on Tuesday. The Devils will be life-and-death just to qualify to be sacrificial lambs for the Tampa Bay Lightning. St. John’s lost 11 games in a row. Fordham lost 20 games again. Heck, even New York’s two Major League Soccer teams flamed out in the playoffs. On. And on. And on. And on.

Yes. Say it again. And say it slowly:

Baseball …

Is …

Back …

This is always the most optimistic day of the year anyway, for any team can believe 100 wins is in sight when everyone else has the same 0-0 record. Any team can believe this is the team, this is the year, this is the group, this is the one.

“This team, for me, is way better than the one we had in 2015,” Yoenis Cespedes said of the Mets, and when you consider the 2015 Mets fell three games shy of a world championship, that would, indeed, qualify as optimism.

“Knowing what we can do is what really has me excited, knowing what we can be,” Giancarlo Stanton said of the Yankees, and when you consider the hopes and expectations that have been attached to this team since that final out of Game 7, optimism is only the starting point to what might lay ahead across the next six months.

Yes. Let the prose run purple today, let it spill and splash and splatter, let us feel the promise of summer even in the damp 48-degree chill of Flushing, and the 42-degree gloom of Toronto (where, thankfully, there is a roof and climate control inside Rogers Centre).

More than most years, we don’t just look forward to Opening Day, we crave it. Baseball is back. Say it again.