You’re worried. Panicked, even. How do you function at work, home and school for the coming week when everyone around you is absorbed by the Boston Red Sox?

Oh, cry me a river.

Sit back and enjoy the ride. Watch and learn. Stop worrying about your employees’ lack of productivity, your spouse’s inattention to the rising stack of trash and dirty dishes or your grandmother’s short-term memory loss.

Everything will return to normal in a week. OK, two weeks. That’s seven nights to play the games, and seven more for the celebration or the pity party.

This one’s for all the wives who’ve coerced their husbands to watch “Beaches” or “Fried Green Tomatoes” instead of the late game in Anaheim. For every dad who worried that his daughter should be wearing ballet slippers instead of cleats. For any computer wizard who diabolically blocked fantasy baseball sites from office Web browsers.

Deal with it, y’all.

Sit down with a cold beverage. Warm, if you’d like. Put down the book of crossword puzzles and at least pretend to watch the World Series.

Ask the right questions and you might even start to get it. Or, dare I suggest, enjoy it.

Right now, the idea of your friends and neighbors being this hopped-up in honor of a baseball team is as foreign to you as the numbers on the MSNBC stock ticker.

Try to look at this rationally. Think about why you enjoy classical music, sunflower seeds, romance novels or communism. Because they give you a sense of peace, comfort, belonging and well-being, right?

Well, that’s how we feel. And yes, from this sentence forward, I will refer to Red Sox and their fan base collectively in the first person plural, even though the most athletic accomplishment millions of us enjoyed yesterday was tying our shoes.

This, also, you’ll be asked to accept without smirking or rolling your eyes.

As for this inexplicable devotion, stop and consider yourself.

Haven’t you ever carried a torch for a love interest who treated you like dirt, toyed with your emotions and stomped the heart you wore on your sleeve? That’s the blissfully dysfunctional relationship we enjoy with our Boston Red Sox.

Eighty-six years since Babe Ruth’s final contribution to a world championship in Beantown, we’re appearing in only our fifth fall classic. In each of the first four, we lost the seventh and deciding game.

Imagine being left at the altar four times. Or missing the Powerball jackpot by a single digit four times. Would you quit seeking companionship or stop playing the game? Didn’t think so.

Somehow, identifying ourselves with the Red Sox and their tear-stained past identifies us as New Englanders. It’s the membership card.

We survive ice storms. We thrive in the face of lower-than-the-national-average pay and exorbitant taxes. We eat adversity for dinner and wash it down with cautious optimism.

And for all the faults, foibles and missteps of the big-league product, baseball remains America’s Pastime. Forget the television ratings. Consider that the Sox merely getting to the championship round is a bigger story throughout the region than the New England Patriots’ two Super Bowl triumphs combined.

Yes, the games begin too late at night. Yes, player salaries and physiques are inflated. Through it all, baseball is the first game most of us embraced before we were old enough to have a care in the world. Before we learned to be cynical or how to quit.

To paraphrase Major League Baseball’s current ad campaign, we live for this. Win or lose, many of us will bawl like a nursery full of newborns when it’s over.

Good practice for “Terms of Endearment” or whatever else we’ll be forced to watch in making up for lost time.

Kalle Oakes is the Sun Journal’s staff columnist. His e-mail is [email protected].