For those of you new to this part of the country, I apologize for what’s about to happen.

The time between the Fourth of July and about Sept. 15 is, for lack of a better term, hellish. All this green you’re seeing now, the result of a bunch of rain this spring and summer? It’ll be gone, burned to a crisp, brown.

This period and February are easily the worst parts of the Kansas calendar, worth going away to avoid. I’ve always said if I had unlimited money and time, I’d ditch this joint after the Fourth for a couple of months in Minnesota, and then I’d find a tropical February residence. Florida, maybe, if you can avoid the psychopaths, or Belize or Maui.

On the other hand, doing so would cancel my Kansas membership card. It feels somehow morally upright, purifying, I suppose, to suffer through. Those of us who do it long enough come to not really trust nice days, as if they’re a mirage or false advertising. It’s also sort of an initiation; doing it together makes us all psychological siblings. We know the secret handshake. Phi Sweatta Tonna.

Again addressing you newbies, let me reassure that it will, in fact, end. Some Saturday in October, there will be a home game, and the trees will explode in yellows and oranges and reds, and this will be the most beautiful place on the face of the earth. It’ll really be that way for quite awhile, between mid-September when the heat finally breaks until around Thanksgiving. And even then it’ll be pretty decent until after Christmas. Which is when it’ll become the Bataan Death March of cold.

But I’ve already outlined in a previous column in this space the seven seasons of Kansas, so I don’t need to do that here. What we’re just now entering is the Dog Days season, the highlight of which is the county fair. The downside of it is, as you can already tell, that it’s like living at the business end of a blowtorch. The only things alive are the cicadas; their buzzsaw sound will be enough to drive you nuts.

If there’s a good part, it’s that the oppressive humidity will give way; there won’t be enough moisture to sustain it.

Just be glad you’re not on a football roster, going through two-a-days, or in the marching band, hoisting your tuba around on “Wabash Cannonball” when the thermometer says 101 in the shade. That turf at the old stadium is probably 117.

Hey, you chose this place, so don’t look at me. I did, too.

Anyway, now you’re fully informed. Welcome to the fraternity.