We can talk about all the things that we won't have in baseball this year, starting with packed stadiums. We can talk about how we've lost one of the things that sets baseball apart, which means the long season, about how it's a sprint this time, a 100-yard dash, and not a marathon. And put me down as being totally fine with that.

"You better bring it, every single day," my friend Buck Showalter, now working for the YES Network, said on Friday. "None of this, 'I'll get 'em tomorrow.' Nope. Not this year. You better get 'em today."

Then Showalter was talking about when the Orioles and White Sox played a game without fans, in Baltimore, back in 2015.

"What was the time of that game?" Buck said. "Two hours and 10 [minutes]? [It was actually 2:03]. You wait and see how everything moves along. So it's not just the season that's going to go fast. Everything is going to go fast."

The circumstances of that game were tragic, as fans were prohibited because of the rioting occurring at the time after the death of a man named Freddie Gray while Gray was in police custody. But that game does give us a glimpse of what this season could look like.

It's going to be different. You bet it is. The Show has become a different kind of show -- and it has a chance to be great. We have been hearing for years that baseball does need to get faster. Guess what? It doesn't just get faster now, it's going to feel like a "Fast and Furious" sequel. People who wring their hands worrying about what we don't have and what we've lost might end up missing a terrific movie.

I keep hearing that we might get an outlier of a champion because of the 60 games. Maybe we will. And what happens then, the stars fall out of the heavens? This isn't about the 162 games we usually get. This is about the season they're about to play. Tell me without looking it up which team won the NBA title when they played a 50-game regular season in 1999 (spoiler alert: It was the Spurs). In sports, you always hear that you can only play who you play. Now you can only play how many you play.

Instead of April, baseball is going to start in July and, as usual, finish at the end of September. If the virus allows it, it will set up crazy good October baseball. Yeah, tradition goes out the window this time. Nobody ever thought we'd go from 162 to 60. And no one ever thought we'd be living our lives wearing facemasks, either.

This is going to feel like a March Madness of a regular season over the last two months of summer. One loss doesn't knock you out, the way it does in the NCAA Tournament. But a couple of bad weeks might. Imagine if the Yankees or Dodgers, who were the favorites to make it to one more Dodgers-Yankees World Series in the spring, are fighting for their playoff lives in their leagues with one week to go instead of running away from things.

You know something else? I happen to love the universal designated hitter, which will eventually even make the World Series better, if the season plays all the way out.

Showalter, as much of a baseball purist as I have ever known or ever expect to know, is absolutely right when he says, "The teams that understand that sense of urgency are the ones who are going to be there in September, when it might look like everybody is in play."

It will be a different September this time. A different everything, starting with when we're finally going to get Opening Day, all of us hoping that once we get there, the game doesn't close down for good in 2020.

"The baseball season has been considerably shortened," Dodgers manager Dave Roberts told me Friday. "Everybody understands that. For us to have Major League Baseball in 2020 is a huge victory in itself. I hope fans understand this and enjoy the best collection of talent our game has ever seen."

Roberts knows the deal. Everybody does. His Dodgers don't want to risk a slow start in a "Fast and Furious" season. No one does. No dog days of August this time, not when August is the second week of the regular season. Not baseball as we've known it. Still baseball.

"You know the old line about there being no crying in baseball?" Showalter asked. "Well, this time there's no procrastinating."