The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

Y Hope springs eternal, but not when it comes to the Jays That's Life Andy Juniper Guest Contributor 19 | Thursday, March 27, 2014 | OAKVILLE BEAVER | www.insideHALTON.com ou've heard the old saying, hope springs eternal? Well, around our house growing up, hope sprang eternally each and every spring. Hope, as I recall, sat at the kitchen table wearing a collared shirt, dress slacks, suspenders, and owlrimmed glasses, nervously listening to baseball broadcasts crackling over the airwaves from Chicago. And hope smoked a pipe for which wooden matches were struck in an absentminded effort to keep the tobacco alight. In our house, hope was my grandfather. A sportswriter, a baseball fanatic, and a diehard fan of the Chicago Cubs. Then, as now, you had to pretty much personify hope if you cheered for the hapless, hopeless Cubbies who had endured (and continue to endure) a seemingly ceaseless streak of unfathomable ineptitude. Put it this way, today, there are 106-year-olds in the Windy City who have never borne witness to the Cubs winning a World Series. Still, every spring my grandfather deliberately disregarded things like scouting reports, preseason predictions and logic and hung his hat on the possibility that this might be the Cubs' year. Even if unfounded, such optimism was beautiful to behold. Likewise, such optimism is a part of the swagger of springtime, it's part of the magic and mystery of baseball: that come spring, every team has a clean slate and fans can hold out a little hope for... hope. Because over the course of a long season, unforeseeable and unimaginable things happen on a regular basis and what the purported experts deem to be inevitable isn't always inevitable. So-called sure things stumble with surprising regularity and even those universally considered to be without hope can rightfully harbor hope -- as the old-timers are always saying, "stranger things have happened" -- right up to the point in the season when the statisticians draw their pocket calculators, ring up the numbers, and determine that hope has been of cially, mathematically eliminated. Which brings me to your Toronto Blue Jays, who open their 2014 season on Monday in Tampa Bay, Fla. And if you listen to the purported experts (and there's a vociferous whack of them out there), if you've subjected yourself to an awful earful from the pon- ti cators on sports talk radio, you know that it is a season sans hope. Just this week, one radio segment dealt with how the Jays should rebuild for 2015 -- this before a single pitch has been thrown in 2014. It's discouraging, disheartening. A friend called to lament, saying the barrage of know-it-all negativity has really sucked the joy and the life out of what normally is a joyous, lively, and, yes, hopeful time of year. I concurred, then reminded my friend that the same purported experts who have so hammered hope, killed joy, and buried the Jays are the same gasbags who last spring were (slightly prematurely, it turns out) plotting World Series parades in downtown Toronto. All this for a team that would nish dead last in the American League East. Fans, baseball is back. Like my grandfather before me, I'm holding out a little hope for hope, and the Jays. Because that's a time-honoured tradition of spring, and it's part of the mystery and magic of baseball. -- Andy Juniper can be contacted at ajjuniper@gmail.com, found on Facebook www.facebook.com, or followed on Twitter at www.twitter.com/thesportjesters. Drive 4 UR Oakville Curling Club Saturday The Ford of Canada Drive 4 UR Community program will help raise funds for the Oakville Curling Club Saturday (March 29). Hosted by Oak-Land Ford Lincoln, the event will see $20 donated by the 224 Allan St. dealership and Ford of Canada for every test-drive of a Ford vehicle. "We're excited to partner with members of the Oakville Curling Club to help raise funds for equipment," Lou Machado, sales manager at Oak-Land Ford Lincoln, said in a news release. "Not only is the drive program a chance to support extracurricular activities and give back to the community, but it allows us the opportunity to showcase Ford of Canada's high-quality line-up and innovative safety technologies to parents, teenagers and other drivers." The event will run from 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Participants must be aged 18 or older and have a valid driver's licence. There is a limit of one test-drive per household. Since the program's inception in 2010, Oak-Land Ford Lincoln has raise more than $36,000 for local community programs.