The opening day of the 2012 major league baseball season is less than a week away. This, normally, would be a time for optimism. As a life-long Chicago Cubs fan, opening day is one of the few times I’ve been able to look forward to.

As they’ve said around the ivy-covered walls of Wrigley Field for many decades, there’s the first pitch and then everything goes downhill from there.

This year, however, opening day just has yours truly feeling downright old. For a number of years, I’ve always charted the number of players in Major League Baseball that are older than myself. It’s a sort of personal measuring stick of what’s still possible at my age.

This year, that stick turned into a club. What once used to be a list in the double digits has, through the wonders of winter retirements, shrunk to just a pair of names.

Mariano Rivera and Takashi Saito, you’re my heroes, because you’re all that’s keeping my generation from being part of the annals of baseball history.

Sure, there are a few NFL kickers who will reach AARP card status before I do. The NBA has a couple folks hanging on at the bench end of the roster. There might even be a snaggletoothed NHL defenseman or two who have more candles on their cake than I do.

But that’s a small fraternity, and it is quickly shrinking. Once it vanishes, my boyhood years spent looking up to various sports figures vanishes with it.

Don’t even try pointing at the PGA Tour to try and soothe me. Sure, there’s a couple dozen golfers on the Tour that were already playing for a living when I was teeing it up for my freshman season of high school, but if you’re playing golf full time that makes it look entirely too much like retirement, and that’s the last thing I need to be thinking about as I try to avoid feeling old.

I admit, it is a silly standard to look up to. After all, I hardly fall into the category of aspiring professional athlete.

That said, it’s still a standard, arbitrary though it might be. I’ve spent a number of years writing about sports. Before that, I played a few. Both before and during all that time, I’ve watched more than my share.

Like most people, I’ve watched and wondered what that sort of lifestyle might be like. I’ve imagined what it might be like to suit up in front of thousands of screaming fans. Every swing of the bat in the pasture had the World Series riding on it. Every pass hauled in on the schoolyard was the Super Bowl clinching play.

But those dreams were always forward-looking. I’ve never been faced with the reality of having all the action in the rear-view mirror.

Oh, sure, there have been thoughts back to certain teams, certain players and certain styles and wondering if the game would ever get back to being like that. There have been moments spent wondering if I’d ever again witness somebody that good.

But there was always someone older to inspire the dreams of becoming like that.

Thanks to Rivera and Saito, there still are. That list is getting mighty short though, and I’m starting to feel pretty long in the tooth.