You miss a lot of little things when you torch one of those precious vacation weeks and leave Maine just in time to avoid April Fools’ Day.

Mud. Flooded basements. The potholes dotting the main thoroughfare of your nearest All-American City. College baseball games that can’t happen. Dozens of casual fans engaging you in conversation about NCAA basketball, even though you know they couldn’t find Davidson or Gonzaga on a map.

So much important stuff to coincide with what feels like the deadest week of the year in sports. Well, at least until I sifted through the wad of newspapers that I’m sure left my motor carrier assigning me middle names that aren’t printable in this forum.

Catching up was a more difficult proposition than I dared imagine. And far be it from the Friendly Neighborhood Curmudgeon to miss an opportunity to right a wrong or three in the sporting universe.

• I’m afraid big league sports’ obsession with overseas travel and catering to an alleged international market is here to stay. But I’m hoping every Office of the Commish will exercise reason and not hang the dreaded albatross around the neck of the same teams every year, simply because they are the most popular.

Yes, in the interest of full disclosure, I’m speaking as a lifelong, unabashed fan of the Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics, et al.

Boston’s three-game skid into the American League East cellar over the weekend was 1,000 percent the responsibility of Major League Baseball and an utterly ridiculous itinerary that yanked the Sox out of the Grapefruit League and into Japan, China, Cuba, Azerbaijan, Djibouti, Sri Lanka and Canada, all before Tuesday’s home opener against the less-traveled but far more disappointing Tigers. By my calculations, this road trip involved 200,000 air miles and eight cases of Montezuma’s (Hirohito’s?) Revenge.

Seriously, I have no problem with marketing our nation’s ridiculous obsessions across the oceans, ultimately futile as it may be. If these charades must continue, though, the people in charge must refrain from screwing over their human props the way baseball did with the Red Sox.

A five-day round trip to Japan for a split-session doubleheader is bad enough with the impossible adjustments for jet lag, messed-up sleeping habits, differences in food and drink, etc. Then to make the team fly even Farther East (er, west) to play an exhibition series in a Little League park in the human wrongs capital of the world, AND travel to Oakland and Ontario BEFORE its home opener, is laughable.

It leaves me to interpret one, loud-and-clear message to the Sox from the desk of one Bud Selig: That two championships in four years thing was a nice story, guys. I’ll do everything in my power to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

• My heart sank for Mark Just, Matt McKnight, Brian Petrovek and the members of the Lewiston Maineiacs’ and Portland Pirates’ brain trusts when they learned that theirs was one of the also-ran bids for the 2009 Memorial Cup. From all indications, it was a brilliant sales pitch. Call me an Ugly American, but it’s hard for me to imagine Rimouski summoning the same amenities and flourishes that Maine’s collective would have.

It’s just as hard for me to comprehend, however, that any of those men seriously thought the Maineiacs had a legitimate chance to be tabbed tournament hosts. My limited exposure to the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League over the last five years has shown me that Canada wields an obvious us-against-them mentality regarding its national game. (And why not?) Not to mention that I can’t see two franchises routinely playing to half-full arenas when they’re not in first place convincing the brass that the locals would float a junior hockey tournament in late May.

• A Final Four comprised exclusively of No. 1 seeds, huh? File that one in the Be Careful Whatcha Wish For category. Styles make fights, as they say in boxing, and that clash of styles didn’t give us anything close to a clash of titans on Saturday. Let the record show that I was rooting for Memphis on Monday night, if only so I could hear Bill Self’s “I could give a s— about Stillwater” speech.

• Best father son-conversation from my week in the Red States:

The boy: “Dad, why does the clock on MLS games count up instead of down?”

Me: “Um, I don’t really know. I think it’s because they let the clock run when somebody gets hurt.”

The Boy: “Why don’t they just stop the clock?”

Me: “I don’t know that, either. Why don’t we use the metric system?”

The Boy: “That’s stupid.”

Not sure what made me prouder: His conclusion, or the fact that less than five more minutes of that Galaxy-Earthquakes game put him to sleep.

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