For a true sports enthusiast, the months of January, February and March can be tough.

No college football, professional football ends the first of week of February and the NBA just isn’t the captivating sport it used to be.

But then comes the wonderful sounds echoing from Florida of engines powering up and bats finding their pop as NASCAR’s season begins in Daytona and Major League Baseball’s spring training arrives.With those distant sounds, goes the pitter patter of the true sports lover’s heart as you realize that the long winter is about over and the boys and toys of summer are here.

It’s been a much anticipated and really fun two weeks of “Speedweeks” put on by Nascar in Daytona. All winter long, I’ve watched and read of how different a season it will be.

Changes in NASCAR are evident. No off-season testing on sanctioned tracks means that the racing teams fortunate to own 7post -shaker units have an even widening information gap on the other outfits. For the first time in over 50 years, there is no Petty Enterprises nor a Petty driving a car in the Cup Series. Several drivers and sponsors have changed places and I still don’t know which is harder to get used to: that kid Logano representing Home Depot or Tony Stewart wearing red in a Cup race.

Baseball too has its share of changes.

The Yankees and Mets, never , ever trying to outdo the other of course, christen beaming and bright new stadiums in the forms of the new Yankee Stadium and Citi Financial Parks.

Also, New York is once again “free-agent city” as about $350 million dollars later, the Yankees are once again the cream of the American League East and the New York Mets are armed to play the spoiler to Cinderella city - Philadelphia.

As always, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Baltimore are “rebuilding”, trying to recover the glory days of yesteryear.

Then there is the horrible sound of silence in Dodgertown as the Dodgers, for the first time in years, have spring training elsewhere.

As another baseball season begins, it just wouldn’t be modern baseball without some new steroids controversy rearing its ugly head of grief and destruction as yet another of baseball’s supermen fall at the feet of their own particular brands of kryptonite.

Ahh, admist all this it’s good to have our friends known as NASCAR and baseball back. The smell of spring is in the air!

That’s how I see it from the other side of the desk. See ya at a baseball game or a Daytona 500 party soon!