By Andy Tarnoff Publisher Published Apr 06, 2015 at 12:05 PM

Something weird happened to me around the beginning August last year: I started wanting the Brewers season to be over.

I’ve asked around, and it turns out I wasn’t alone. None of us real Brewers fans understood why this team had stayed in first place, and when they started falling apart, it was not even just expected, it was tragically appropriate. Most of us knew this wasn’t a good team, and rather than getting our hearts broken in the first week of October, we just wanted a reset.

That feeling somehow stuck with me all winter, to the extent that I almost didn’t go to spring training. I worried that Doug Melvin wasn’t making the right moves (um, Adam Lind?) and we’d see another underachieving squad in 2015.

But now I’m here, sitting in the press box, and excitement is back in the air.

Opening Day is an important holiday for me. In 1998, it marked my first day of self-employment – and thus, the first real day of OnMilwaukee.com – and I celebrated that milestone tailgating at County Stadium.

Now, it’s a more mellow, business casual affair, but an exciting one, personally, nonetheless. I watched Brewers batting practice from the field, saying hello to fellow media and Brewers employees I haven’t talked to in a while. And now I’m watching fans very slowly stream in. The Rockies are now taking BP and the crack of the bat is a welcome sound.

My off-season indifference will start to fade as the games become real. I remain concerned about this team, but I’ve watched many far worse Brewers squads over the year.

Baseball is back, and so am I. I think I’m finally ready for a fresh start.

Andy is the president, publisher and founder of OnMilwaukee. He returned to Milwaukee in 1996 after living on the East Coast for nine years, where he wrote for The Dallas Morning News Washington Bureau and worked in the White House Office of Communications. He was also Associate Editor of The GW Hatchet, his college newspaper at The George Washington University.

Before launching OnMilwaukee.com in 1998 at age 23, he worked in public relations for two Milwaukee firms, most of the time daydreaming about starting his own publication.

Hobbies include running when he finds the time, fixing the rust on his '75 MGB, mowing the lawn at his cottage in the Northwoods, and making an annual pilgrimage to Phoenix for Brewers Spring Training.