It’s got nothing to do with that poor, groggy Pennsylvania rodent that gets dragged out of his cozy den every year and held up in front of a camera, blinking like a video-game junkie emerging from a 36-hour World of Warcraft session. Poor Phil wouldn’t be anywhere near that harsh, brain-piercing daylight if it wasn’t for us impatient bipeds who can’t pay enough attention to the signs all around us and should be obvious if we’d only open our own bleary eyes. Signs such as these:

• The sad final rind of filthy, gritty, grayish snow has finally melted from that spot on the front lawn that’s always shaded by the front of the house.
• The kitty boys want to stay outside all day, and most of the night.
• There’s a tremendous line at the carwash as everybody decides now is the time to hose off a three-month encrustation of road salt.
• A gleaming yellow-and-white ’57 Chevy Bel Air pulls up next to you at a stoplight. Fifty-seven Bel Airs never have a three-month encrustation of salt on them, because they don’t leave the garage during the salty cold season.
• You see people wearing shorts at Target. Granted, this is Utah and people here are weird, so you can see that at nearly anytime of the year, but they’re not wearing a parka over their shorts.

But you want to know the real indicator, the bottom-line, surefire, yep-there’s-no-going-back-now portent that we’ve finally broken the frigid back of Old Man Winter and those carefree summer days are right around the corner?

• You drink your morning coffee to a serenade of about 257 Harley motorcycles rumbling past the house.

After the winter we’ve had, that’s sweeter music than “Moonlight Serenade” was to a 19-year-old private dancing his first dance back home after V-E Day. (Sorry. I’ve been watching a very long TV documentary on World War II lately…)