It was the late innings and runs were hard to come by. I wasn’t swinging for an infield dribbler or a bloop single. No, man. I was swinging for the fence. I was looking to tie this game up with one blast. Become a hero. Get mobbed at home plate celebration.

I was waiting on a fast ball up and that’s what I got. I swung hard, connected and watched the ball sail up and away. Back, back, back it went. It bounced off a crock pot on a high shelf. It ricocheted between the cupboards and the fridge. It knocked over a salt shaker and then landed, spinning, on the stove.

I don’t know what the rules are in your kitchen, but in my place, that’s a home run every time.

The crowd was going crazy. I waved to them as I rounded the bases, making sure to touch the welcome mat and that one faded tile near the hall. All tied up, baby! We got a game!

Stir crazy?

You bet.

Cabin fever? Jack Nicholson whacking his way through a door is a more cheerful sight than I am as I mope and mutter and whine my way through winter. Long games of kitchen ball just aren’t enough. If you can’t make the full leap into outright delusion, like Jack and his pet axe, then winter owns you.

Not that I don’t try. I go for long rides on the dual sport in the basement. There’s some good terrain over by the water heater, just beyond the lawn mower. If you can climb that mound of trash waiting to be taken to the curb, you can ride all the way over to the work bench. Best cellar trails anywhere and how about the heat from that single bulb, huh? Awesome.

You can putt for par on the living room carpet, do the backstroke in your tub or strap a saddle on your collie and try to ride him.

You can spend all your time at the tanning beds or try to move right into the home and garden section at Lowe’s. But they’ll just call security. There will be cops and restraining orders and the next thing you know, your boss is pulling you into his office to advise that your status as a news reporter is in peril.

Or something.

You can do lots of things to provide the illusion of good weather and good times. But the moment you have to step outside, the fantasy melts like a Popsicle in the microwave. You might as well be trapped in a walk-in freezer.

You can’t count on driving away because ice and snow will muck up your travel plans. If the cold isn’t enough to hustle you back inside, the early dark will surely do it.

The point is, unless you have the fortune of going Norman Bates crazy (or you happen to be one of those weirdos who likes snow and cold, which amounts to the same thing) you’re in for a long, white haul.

The TV weather people are Norman Bates crazy. It’s not just one storm in the forecast this week, it’s a pair of white killers. Which means they can finally use some of the advanced stuff they learned in that class they took on weather reporting. Wind chill. Kung Fu Barometry. Advance hand gesturing and laser pointing.

Reporters who have somehow offended a superior will be sent out to the street to give a live report on the fact that it sure is cold outside. “My lips are blue and two of my fingernails just fell off, Lou. It sure is cold outside.”

It’s so cold that of course a job shadow shows up in the newsroom demanding to watch me go about my nightly work. I’ll obediently take her out for a ride through the city explaining how things would look if it wasn’t eight below zero.

“A fight!” I’ll scream, pointing to a specific spot on the sidewalk at Walnut and Bartlett. “Right there. A heavyset woman versus a smaller, scrappier dame who danced with the bigger lady’s boyfriend down at the Acme. And if you look up the street there, toward Birch, you’ll see three cops wrestling with a muscular man who won’t go quietly. The muscular man is a suspect in a break-in at the pawn shop and he’s hopped up on meth. He’s giving the cops quite the time of it but, oh look! Here comes the Taser!”

These are things that would be happening if it was 50 degrees warmer, I try to tell the young job shadow in my passenger seat. Only she quietly slipped out of my car way back when I first started imagining criminal activity on Pine Street. I was so involved in my fantasies of a lively city, I never saw her sprinting away.

If you’re a late-beat reporter, you need to hallucinate like this to keep the nights lively. There is nothing moving out there. It’s a cold, dead city with no swagger, no bawdiness. The bad guys are inside, playing video games, waiting it out. Lewiston is one, big freezer with the lid closed and locked up tight.

So, if you can, you stay home wrapped in an afghan drinking cups of cocoa and getting your social fix through Facebook. Forget about the cold out there. You have friends right here on the computer screen.

To illustrate my point that YOU CAN’T ESCAPE WINTER, I actually took the time to cut and paste a dozen Facebook status updates from people around the state. Every other person posted their temperature readings and snowfall amounts. Six below at your house? That’s nothing. We got 19 below and I have to go outside and feed the alpacas.

But that was cumbersome. And anyway, I accidentally hit ctrl+z instead of ctrl+v and lost the whole damn thing. So I’ll use the following post to serve as an example of how we embraced our sub-zero imprisonment.

“3 deg. F. here at 4:10 p.m., with -20 wind chills. Was outside trying to figure out why the water isn’t flowing into the washer on the first floor. Learned the plug had been blown off the old dryer vent in the basement and cold air was flowing in and freezing the hot and cold plastic piping. Plugged it from the inside and then shoveled snow against the side of the house covering it.”

As far as I’m concerned, that’s bad weather poetry. A sonnet to survival. If I can keep my pipes from freezing and I have people to complain to, I’m doing just fine.

Because, let’s face it. Complaining about the cold is an act of defiance, a survival skill inherited from cavemen who first tried throwing rocks at the snow, and when that failed, threw rocks at each other. Those were good times.

Me, I don’t have enough book learning to handle the complex math of weather reporting, so I can’t post my weather updates like the rest of you. Which is fine, really, because I have invisible people downtown and a stadium full of fans in the kitchen.