You know you’re a die-hard Spring golfer when…

• Your partner has to buy a hearing aid to hear polite banter over the howling wind.

• Your “water-proof” shoes and socks are soaked through after taking five steps from the first tee.

•Your ball finds a water hazard that seems new to you. When you ask, you discover it is in fact a sand trap.

• Your hat flies a greater distance backward after a swing off of tee No. 3 than your ball flies forward.

• You spend more time prospecting for plugged balls in the middle of the fifth fairway than playing the rest of the hole.

• Your “best guess” at a par-3 lands you 50 yards short and you laugh, saying “It can only get better, right?”

• Your left shoe is still in a bunker on the seventh hole as you trudge up the eighth fairway.

• You finish a beverage after playing the front nine, still shoeless, and decide it’s a good idea to play another nine. After all, you did pay for it, right?

For more than five months, as Spring gives way to Summer and then fades to Autumn, bears are not the only animal in Maine to return to a state of living from a Winter-long hibernation. The clinking of irons bounced back and forth inside of a bag and the subtle ping of a ball hitting the composite face of club-formerly-known-as-a-wood serve notice to fellow humans that the golfers are emerging from the indoor driving ranges, and the clubs are finding their way down from attics and up from basements again.

Welcome back, golfers. We’ve missed you.

While too many children are numbing their minds in front of television screens or are buried in front of the latest personal video game device, golfers are ready to break through to the outside, ready to get a daily or weekly workout by carrying clubs across 7,000 yards while pausing just long enough to hit the ball in the general direction of a flag stick. The courses, they are ready too. The greens have been covered by snow this season, a luxury they did not enjoy last year. The snow has allowed some greens that were eaten away by mold and ice last year to survive healthy this year. The greens will be healthy, and the holes will await any holes-in-one, two or 10, so long as they are played legally.

The fairways, while perhaps a bit greedy early on, will no doubt return to giving generous bounces as the winds whisk the moisture away from for the summer.

The tee boxes will again stand ready to be your doormat, golfers. Stand on them, stick them with your tees and take the best lie you possibly can. You only get 18 perfect lies per round.

The Masters teased area golfers with a scintillating matchup, even giving viewers bonus golf to watch as Tiger Woods won in a playoff. Every golfer dreams of hitting a shot like Woods hit on the 16th hole, one that defines, for most golfers, a lifetime. The random holes-in-one at Fairlawn, Prospect Hill or Norway Country Club; the 340-yard drives with a 16-mile-per-hour tailwind that may never fly straight again; the 89s that some of you will shoot, breaking 90 for the first time; the 78s some of you will shoot, shooting your age for the first time; and the people that you will undoubtedly meet to fill out foursomes that fall one or two people short on a given Saturday afternoon.

Those are the moments that we as golfers in Central and Western Maine will take away. There may not be tournament-winning shots at Augusta Country Club in anyone’s immediate future, but there are moments out there, waiting to happen, that may mean as much, if not more.

Whether it is your first time out for the year, your first time out after a long absence, or your first time out ever, go out to your local course and play a round or two. It may get a bit sloppy in the early going, and you may lose a shoe, or hit the ball into a water-filled bunker, but laugh about it.

After all, You have five months to fix everything, remember?

Justin Pelletier is a staff writer. He can be reached at [email protected]