Selig told us Thursday that he had to tell teams to be ready to travel "in case that was the decision we made" (to play this weekend). He also downplayed talk that the NFL influenced his decision. Some of his cohorts in the business are convinced otherwise. But baseball players were very aware of what their peers in shoulder pads were saying and thinking.

"If they cancel the football games," one player said Wednesday night, "it would sure look strange for us to be out there."

After the NFL decision came down Thursday morning, many players were more convinced than ever they shouldn't play. One prominent player called his agent afterward and said, "I hope I'm not the one one not playing. But there's no way I'm playing Friday."

Now, that won't be an issue. It shouldn't ever have been an issue.

Selig said Thursday that, ultimately, the only factor in this decision was "my own sense of right and wrong." And we'll give him this: So far, every step of the way, throughout this nightmarish week, he's been on the side of right.

He was right in being the first to cancel games in any sport. He was right in taking this a day at a time initially, to let the impact of these powerful events sink in.

He's right, too, to want to play all 162 games. Many, many people have devoted months of their lives to getting themselves to this point in the baseball season. Selig decided he owed it those people to play a full season, because "how would I explain it to a club that finished a half-game out that I didn't feel those games were important."

And Bud Selig is especially right to be definitive in setting a date to start the games again.

Players need that. They need it to gear up psychologically to play baseball again. One player told us that waking up every morning, not knowing when the games would start again and reflecting on the horrors out there in the real world, was incredibly draining. He said he'd lost "the rhythm of baseball ... and I don't know how I'm going to get it back."

But now he and his fellow players have time to set their internal clocks for Monday, to gradually do their best to make sense of this week and then focus on returning to work.

In the meantime, knowing Monday is now a firm date gives all of us that chance. We all need that. We need it to gear up again ourselves -- for a return not just to the ballpark, but to whatever sort of normalcy is possible.

And it may not be possible. We can't set this story aside and move on because the story isn't over yet. It has a thousand chapters to go: Stories of life and death, stories of tragedy and heroism, stories of war and retaliation. Those stories will be the backdrop of all of our lives for longer than we can imagine.

We are going to find out now where baseball fits, where the whole sports world fits, into that kind of world. And baseball players are no different. They wonder about that, too.

"We will never be the same as a nation," Mets pitcher Al Leiter told us Wednesday. "I think there should be a few days of mourning and reflection. (But) baseball is our national pastime and the core of the American spirit. We should not let a horrendous, cowardly, terrorist act freeze the nation from functioning, and that includes a baseball game."

Phillies center fielder Doug Glanville, as thoughtful a man as you'll find in this game, agreed.

"What we do is so small," Glanville said. "They're still trying to find people at the bottom of that rubble. So if we don't play again for three more days, whatever. But I also think that at some point, it's important to send a message to the world that we've got to continue to do what we do. We're players. That's how we make a living. And when the time is right, we need to go out and do that again."

Baseball may not mean to all of us what it meant 50 years ago, or even five days ago. But it can still evoke those words of Terrence Mann. It can still remind us, especially at times like this, of all that once was good and can be good again.

Bud Selig said he actually read that quote and reflected on it many times as he mulled the decision he announced Thursday.

"I thought about it a lot," he said. "And I just hope, starting Monday, that in whatever way we can begin to help restore faith and hope, we can help people enjoy life again at least a little bit."

By Monday, we hope, the time will feel right for baseball to fill that role. But whatever it was that told the commissioner the time wasn't right Thursday, he listened to the right voice come sweeping out of the cornfield.

Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com.