Ah, spring! Birds chirp, flowers push through bare ground, buds appear on barren trees. The heck with all that, in the Gottlieb house we celebrate the crack of the bat and the thud of a fast ball into a mitt!

In fact, for years, our whole neighborhood has gauged the onset of spring based on when our now 16-year-old son Tom emerges from winter hibernation.

He was about four when he fished one of those crummy plastic baby mitts from his brother’s discarded toy pile and recruited my husband, Henry, to teach him to throw. Then, he’d stand outside tossing a ball up in the air and plaintively begging his dad, older siblings, and cousins, “Have a catch? Have a catch?”

He was our neighborhood’s harbinger of spring. Forget Punxsutawney Phil. If Tom Gottlieb was outside tossing the ball around, certainly spring couldn’t be far behind?

Winter is not our favorite season. Indoors with the heat jacked up, the Gottliebs eagerly count down the days to “pitchers and catchers,” which for the uninitiated occurs in mid-February when the first players show up for professional baseball’s spring training. We deplore the weeks when the sports section of the newspaper is preoccupied with hockey and we measure the distance to opening day based on the slowly expanding newspaper column space devoted to our family sport.

Tom’s enthusiasm for playing and watching baseball fueled our whole family’s interest. It’s curious how each of our children has expanded and shaped who we are as a family. We’re not really good with family dinners, family vacations are a vague memory, but we Gottliebs rally around all varieties of baseball and, most especially, our Mets.

Actually, we were always a baseball family, we just didn’t know it. I have been a fan most of my life. My first baseball game was in May 1967 when Mickey Mantle hit his 500th homerun in an exciting come-from-behind Yankee win over Baltimore. I was smitten. For years, my sister and I took the No. 118 bus, the A train and the D train to Yankee Stadium (it was a different world back then) and sat in the general admission $1.50 seats. We sewed our own pinstripe uniforms and carried banners that cheered our favorite players. They stunk back then, but we loved them anyway.

As time passed, I put aside childish things and moved on, occasionally checking the box scores and taking in a game. Then, I fell in love with a Met fan.

Henry, a Queens kid who attended the first game ever at the Mets’ Shea Stadium, says he knew he had to marry me when he heard me explain the infield fly rule to a friend.

We lived in Europe the first few years of our marriage. Baseball was far away, except when we found an amateur international baseball playoff in Antwerp to satisfy our hunger. Then, when my first pregnancy caused nights of sleeplessness, we’d tune in at 3 a.m. to listen to the 1982 World Series games over the Armed Forces Network.

Thus, we always gravitated to baseball, but it was our Tom’s early and earnest love of the sport that solidified it as our family pastime. Tom became such an avid Met fan that I had to abandon old loyalties and join him. We joke that anyone can be a Yankee fan but that it takes strong personal fortitude to stand by a team that leads you along for four months and then abandons you just before the Prom (and, not once, but twice!).

When the Mets faded from the scene in 2007 on the last day of the season, Tom wailed in frustration and anger. “Now,” his dad said, “now you know what it really means to be a Met fan. This is as bad as it gets. It won’t ever be any worse than it is right now.”

Thus, baseball serves as our family’s metaphor for life. It has taught us about success, about failure, about ethics, about right and wrong, about lying, about cheating, about illness, about heartache…I could go on and on. It’s fodder for dinner conversation when an otherwise surly teen-ager doesn’t want to talk. It brings us together around our television from April through October (we hope!) in the evenings when we would otherwise be squirreled away by ourselves.

Baseball might not bring your family together. Perhaps it is a love of the outdoors, or a fondness for music, or travel. Whatever the vehicle for family unity, celebrate it. Embrace your children’s hobbies, if you can, and use them as opportunities to get to know your child a little better. As for the Gottlieb family, it’s finally April, so “Play Ball!”