Sometime, with many of us distracted, youth baseball got hijacked, its innocence eradicated, its rules rewritten to accommodate the individual, not the collective. And the band plays on, all the way down now through Little League, which has a Burger King Double Whopper of a rule change coming in 2025:

“Starting with the 2025 season,” the new rule reads, “children at the youngest level of the Little League Baseball and Softball (Age 4-7) throughout the United States will have the ability to register for any Little League program they choose, without respect to any geography or school-related eligibility requirements.

“Those players who register under this option will also be fully eligible to participate in all aspects of league play, including International Tournament play, for the duration of their Little League careers provided they have continuous and unbroken participation from the time they are League Age seven within the specific league where initially registered and provided all other participation eligibility requirements have been met.”

Translation: Loyalty to your town, your friends and those who wore your town colors before you means nothing anymore to the people making the rules. They’ve decided that caving to the grass-is-always-greener self-indulgence that’s growing as a societal weed is more prudent than keeping the kids in the town together.

It almost leads to a sarcastic chuckle when our politicos start calling for “unity,” when every rule written now trumpets disconnection.

The change, Little League senior operations director Dan Velte said in a published report, aims to provide more flexibility for families.

“This evolution provides opportunities for families first entering the Little League program while also ensuring our tournament-aged players have a fair and competitive playing field,” he said.

He said that presumably with a straight face, given he is either ignorant (doesn’t know) or ambivalent (doesn’t care) that such decisions actually betray the concept of “fair and competitive playing fields,” not to mention questions why a 4-year-old needs a choice about anything other than “vanilla or chocolate?”

But then, this is the trajectory - or spiral - for youth baseball in Connecticut and across the country. The boundaries - literally and figuratively - are growing thinner, the rulemakers are getting dumber and regular old town sports, such a vibrant and innocent part of many of our childhoods, have suddenly morphed into some inexplicable social outcast. I mean, when did playing for your town Little League team make you Hester Prynne?

The biggest joke is the state Babe Ruth program that keeps ignoring or rewriting its rules to allow multi-town or for-profit travel teams into state tournaments to play one-town, one-team kids. There’s nothing transparent about any of it. Rules and rationalizations are made up as they go along. And yet it keeps happening. Because there aren’t enough adults out there with the backbone to say that one little word:

No.

But then, it turns out that sports keep telling us plenty about ourselves, don’t they? Sports, perhaps now more than ever, show us what we value, don’t value and how the concepts of playing a game and having fun are no longer possible unless there’s winning involved and some kind of scholarship opportunity exists.

The funniest part of the new Little League rule for next year adds the stipulation that “players League Age 8-16 as of the 2025 season will continue to utilize the current boundary requirement based on residency or school enrollment.” Anyone want to lay some FanDuel odds on how long it takes for that rule to change, too?

Because where in sports now are there boundaries anywhere? I know high school kids around here who went to three schools in four years. Reclassification for athletic purposes. College sports are awash in name-image-likeness interests and transfer portals. It’s one, giant free for all. And it’s not merely allowed, but encouraged.

Sometime during the winter of 2025, families with 5-year-olds will be going Little League Baseball and Softball shopping to find programs best suiting little Donald and Donna. The hometown simply isn’t good enough anymore. I can’t think of anything more pathetic.

Until tomorrow arrives and the news gets worse.

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro.