The dreariest day in sports is not the day after baseball’s all-star game.

It’s tomorrow. Period. Exclamation point. In fact, it’s time to officially retire the title and both assume and pray that the athletic universe will never experience such inertia again.

I’m supposed to work Monday night.

Please. It’ll take three pots of coffee and a cocktail of every over-the-counter mood enhancer not regulated by the Food & Drug Administration just to get me out my front door.

For six months straight, the ship has been on autopilot. The fun and games department has been my chief distraction from a flat-lining economy and a world devoid of decency and, at times, hope.

And now we get to be alone with our thoughts and twiddling thumbs.

March Madness goes into the tank for three days, unless you count the women’s tournament. Provide your own punch line here. Let’s just say it would be easier to feign interest if Connecticut weren’t the biggest foregone conclusion since hammer versus nail.

Spring training is a disjointed fiasco. Thank you, World Baseball Classic.

Maybe obscene salaries and a decade of scandal are to blame, but I’m not convinced that any of the participants wield a whit of national pride.

Give Major League Baseball credit, also, for successful branding in spite of its many public-relations disasters. They’ve made it impossible to take these guys seriously in any colors except the ones they wear from April to October.

The Celtics and Bruins won’t play another meaningful game until the format turns to best-of-seven.

Want to get a sneak peek at what the D-League team will look like next fall? Take a look at what the C’s trot out there for a team the nanosecond they clinch second place in the East.

NFL mock drafts are the hallmark symptom of a guy who desperately needs to make changes in his love life.

Major League Soccer is back and earning overnight Nielsen ratings to rival reruns of “Jennifer Slept Here” on TV Land. And the countdown to its extinction continues.

Any golf news between now and the first telltale whoosh on Thursday, April 9 at Augusta National is completely fabricated.

There’s the continuing saga of the Lewiston Maineiacs, if you’re one of the 1,772 that consistently care.

They’re paired with a top-seeded playoff foe that would whack them 99 times out of 100. Whether next year’s highest level occupant of Androscoggin Bank Colisee is from the ‘Q’, Junior ‘A’, a New York-based Slap Shot league, Saturday night high school doubleheaders or Sunday night shinny remains pure hand-wringing and conjecture.

Sure, high school spring sports practice allegedly starts soon as the buses leave the yard tomorrow afternoon.

That thud you’re about to hear is your state champion long jumper rehearsing her landing in the hallway or your clean-up hitter swatting bean-bag balls into a nylon partition in the gym. That’ll be the case anywhere north of Cumberland, anyhow.

University of Maine sports are an oxymoron.

Remember when the Black Bears used to play the sunny half of a home-and-home with Miami at this point in mud season and stood a chance of winning? Or at least not seeing their team ERA triple?

Billy Swift, Billy Reynolds and Mike Bordick were more recognizable to Maine baseball fans than any Red Sox not named Rice or Yastrzemski. Now? Go ahead: name three baseball players at the state university. And pardon me while I go exterminate those chirping crickets.

Remember the two-time national championship hockey program?

Today you can wave a stick six feet above your head and still not reach UMass-Lowell in the Hockey East standings. The Black Bears’ shoulder pads have been in cold storage for a week.

Remember the women’s basketball team traveling south or west and scaring the bejeebers out of a Top 25 tournament opponent with home-court advantage?

Now, if you’re desperate, you may watch Joanna P. McCallie coach Duke or Sharon Versyp lead Purdue, and weep.

Oh, it’s all a temporary situation.

The permafrost will soften.

J.D. Drew will be getting his daily cortisone shots and leaving us to count and curse his guaranteed salary in no time.

Tom Brady will be spotted on TMZ wearing a knee brace or a pneumatic walking boot, giving us all tachycardia.

I’ll be dodging snowflakes during a 3-hour game at Hippach Field and loving life again.

Like your 401(k) or my weight, sports operates in cycles. It’ll recover. It always does.

But I’m looking out my window, bouncing up and down the channel guide, and darned if I know how.

Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. His e-mail is [email protected]