Play Ball — Please!

Here’s a ray of sunshine: Major League Baseball is moving to start the season around the Fourth of July. Fans won’t be able to attend Opening Day in person, but watching the Yankees and Mets play an 80-game season will still be a balm for the quarantined-baseball-lover’s heart.

The owners start working out a deal with the Players Association on Tuesday, but as The Post’s Joel Sherman notes, “there is no way — regardless of both the historic and current bad blood — that MLB and the Players Association are going to shut down the game this year over player compensation. That would be so shoot-yourself-inthe-brain, assure-the-negative-first-line-inyour-obituary stupid that not even these two hostile sides can navigate there.”

The half-season will feature purely regional contests, with each team playing only divisional rivals or foes from the corresponding division in the other league. And the playoffs will expand, with four wild-card teams each for the National and American Leagues.

Local lockdown rules will keep some teams from playing in their own parks — the Canadian teams, for example, have to avoid that nation’s two-week quarantine on anyone entering the country.

It’s still a relief: If you’ve been feeling trapped in “Groundhog Day,” it’s likely because you live by Tom Boswell’s famous rule, “Time begins on Opening Day.”

Even if “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” has to remain symbolic, we’ll still buy some peanuts and crackerjacks.