Welcome to Opening Day!

Opening Day for your own team is always a beautiful thing. Granted, we were dealt a blow on Friday as news of the Ervin Santana suspension came down, but even then it's impossible to completely drown out the joy of baseball actually being back.

We all have our questions. How long will Mike Pelfrey last? Can Torii Hunter put together one more decent campaign? How will Paul Molitor's influence play out in the wins column? When will the organization finally turn the Major League team over to the young players who will actually help this club win games in the future? 2015 will be, unquestionably, a very interesting season for Twins fans.

Being a fan isn't always easy. If it were, we'd all be Yankees fans and would feel like the season was a failure with anything less than a World Series appearance. But I'd like to think that we're a bit deeper than that. We understand that there is no pleasure without pain, there is no appreciation without disappointment, there is no triumph where there has not first been failure. Being a fan sometimes means wading through shit.

The path to success, it's often been said, starts with a single step. I'm not sure I agree with that sentiment entirely. Who this Twins team is now is the result of countless steps showing where they've already been. Everyone loves a storybook narrative in sports, and no narrative is better than that of redemption. Redemption doesn't happen right away, and where our Twins are concerned it's certainly not going to happen in a single season. But if you believe in the talent that the club has been accruing in the minor leagues, there's a chance that redemption could be just around the next corner.

So we hang on. "Just one more season," we tell ourselves. Maybe this will be one of the years that makes it all worth while. Maybe we'll see things that will remind us of the hope and the joy that keep us coming back, year after year.

Whatever happens this season, we're going to be right here. Stick around and hope for the future along with us, won't you? It's worth it.