And so it has come time to go back to the ballparks.

Come Monday night, the green fields will look the same. The rules will remain the same. The balls, the bats, the game of baseball -- they're all just the same as they were when we froze them in time less than a week ago.

But the people who arrive at those ballparks -- to play, to work, to watch -- none of them will be the same. Not Monday, when the first pitch is thrown. Maybe not for a long, long time.

"Every day since this happened," said Rockies GM Dan O'Dowd, "I come here to this office. I come to work. And all I do is sit here and stare at the TV. I don't know anybody personally who was involved in this. Yet I feel such a sense of loss.

"I go to bed at night, and I see that plane going into the building. I go through, in my mind, what it must have been like for those people -- in the plane and in the building. I think about being one of the people on those four planes. You wonder how you'd react. I mean, it's tough. ... We're grieving. And I don't think we can be done grieving in a week."

Every one of us who has had to keep working in this sad and tragic period knows that it's possible to do our jobs as professionally and capably as possible. But it has required a certain strength. And it will for baseball players, as well.

"All of us are human beings first and baseball players second," said Dodgers pitcher Terry Mulholland. "Just as people all around the world don't look at this as an attack on Americans as much as they look at it as an attack on all civilized human beings, for us, human beings is what we all are first. What we do for a living is secondary."

And all of us as human beings know that everyone deals with tragedy and crisis in different ways. So several clubs have already told players they'll make counseling available if they need it. Phillies players arrived at their lockers for a workout Saturday and found pamphlets waiting -- on "Grief and Loss" and "Coping."

Some will need them.

"We understand that in reality, players are big kids," said Indians GM John Hart. "I think it's going to be very hard for these guys to be focused in the same way they were before, with the same let's-go-get-'em mentality they had before Tuesday. They wouldn't be human beings if they didn't feel that.

"Most of these guys have young families. They have wives. They have kids. They're fathers and husbands. They're young guys in the prime of their lives, raising kids, dealing with the same human issues everyone in that stage of life deals with. How can you not expect those guys to feel a little different now than they did before?"

The Indians know all too well that tragedy leaves its mark on the emotions and psyches of players. It is only eight years since two of their players died in a boating accident that shattered their lives in the middle of spring training. Hart said it took three months for his players to get over that loss and really focus on baseball again.

"For three months, we were not emotionally healed where we could be competitive," he said. "Of course, we were a very, very young team at that time. We had no veterans, no free agents. And that was, obviously, a personal, personal loss.

"In this case, we're a more mature team. And this tragedy is something everyone in our game is dealing with. That's the difference. Every American, everyone who plays baseball in America, is dealing with this situation. So when we start to play again, it's going to be emotional. And right now, there's no energy there, no life. But at least having Monday to focus on has given us a chance to come together, to work out and to grieve. I think we'll be much better prepared to play Monday than we would have been Friday."

Who knows how players will react when the games start again? Who knows whether certain teams will react differently than others?

Hart said he wonders if teams out of the race will have trouble being as into it as teams still in contention. After the 1989 World Series earthquake, Giants players -- already down, two games to none, when play resumed -- said they didn't have the same hunger to come back that they had before the earth shook. Will teams trailing in these races -- the Phillies, the Dodgers, the Cubs -- have the same fire they'll need to overtake the teams ahead of them?

No one knows the answers to those questions. Not yet.

Who knows, too, whether the air transportation can get sufficiently back to speed to fill the needs of teams, scouts, umpires and media people to travel to these games? Who knows how many people in the game won't even want to fly?

"Some of our players already had a fear of flying," O'Dowd said. "Are we going to be able to get them on a plane and be comfortable about being there?"

The sheer challenge of getting anywhere last week forced a number of teams into exhausting travel marathons just to get home. How will they ever forget that?

The Red Sox needed 28 hours by bus, train and plane to get from St. Petersburg to Boston. The Phillies took more than 30 hours to travel from Atlanta to Philadelphia on a bus, with a stopover in Cincinnati.

The White Sox, Indians and Blue Jays were among the teams that rode buses for miles through the darkness just so they could walk through their own front doors again. So these teams have been through a powerful, potentially bonding experience without ever playing a game.

Will that experience draw them together in a different way? Will it give them a new sense of the realities of life that many big leaguers haven't tasted in years?

"On that all-night drive through the heartlands of America," Hart said, "I'm sure it made guys remember back to the years in their life where they hadn't made it yet, when they were still so insecure, driving on a bus somewhere to the next game. And now, here they were again, looking at where they were and why they were there."

We also don't know how much heightened security will change the whole experience of being at a baseball game. That security won't end with bans on coolers and backpacks in the bleachers, either. Security is going to be tightened in every aspect of this sport. We will all be grateful for that, yet inconvenienced by it at the same time.

But with all of that -- and the constantly unfolding developments in the real world -- hanging over every pitch, it still has come time to play.

"I just hope that when these guys step between the lines," O'Dowd said, "it reminds them of why they're players, and that joy they get from playing baseball comes back."

"The focus we've got to have," said Mulholland, "is to perform out there. It's a difficult thing. But as professional athletes, we all learn to put aside issues and problems in our personal lives when we cross the foul lines. And that's what has to happen Monday. If we're going to try to heal the nation in any way by entertaining them and performing, then we've got an obligation to play the game the way we did before."

Words like "trivial" and "meaningless" have been used a lot this past week to describe the importance of these games in the panorama of life itself. No one denies those words are accurate in many ways.

But these games do have meaning to all of us, or professional sports wouldn't exist in the first place. And they still can.

A friend from New York told us last week he was walking to work when he saw the second plane fly into the World Trade Center. In the next breath, he said: "I'm looking forward to going to a baseball game next week." What does that tell us?

"If our playing means that a father and son can go to a game and forget all this for a few hours, it's worth it," Hart said. "The game's the same as it was a week ago. It's a beautiful game. And it will still be a beautiful game, even after something like this."

Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com.