Opinion | Want to be a kid again? Try Zelda.

He’s been playing the new title with her after school, after they gamed together during the pandemic through “Breath of the Wild,” the much-acclaimed previous installment.

Bissell writes about how, as he watches his daughter play, he just wants her to get to the monster-fighting in this massively open world, like he did as a child. She’s more interested in building log rafts out of material she finds in-game. “At one point, sensing my impatience,” Bissell writes, “my daughter invoked the Wright brothers as her mathematical proof for the necessity of experimentation.”

But was Bissell really so single-minded himself playing the earliest iteration in the late 1980s? Every Zelda game contains a world meant for “wandering, thinking, tinkering,” he writes. What a wonderful place to be a kid, or at least act like one.

Chaser: Consider this permission to play: Dartmouth professor Janice McCabe wrote in 2019 that to succeed in college, kids should spend more time video-gaming with friends.

Ukraine’s path to safety

When Russian troops attacked her city of Mariupol, 24-year-old Ukrainian schoolteacher Anna Zaitseva took her 3-month-old baby and a few days’ worth of food and diapers to shelter in the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works plant.

She was stuck there 65 days. And that was just the start of her tribulations.

Josh Rogin’s column traces Zitseva’s journey out of the steel plant, through a treacherous “safe corridor” and into a Russian “filtration camp.” Her story is just one of many from behind the line of Russian occupation, Josh writes, all reminders the West can’t turn away from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s atrocities.

Ukraine, of course, wants NATO membership stat, and while the Editorial Board writes that’s not feasible, there is still plenty NATO can do to equip Ukraine for long-term success.

Right now, putting Russia-occupied Ukraine under NATO’s collective security agreement, the board writes, “could trigger a war between the alliance and Russia, which has the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal.”

But retreating from the promise of eventual NATO membership would reward Putin’s aggression. So the board offers a “sensible ordering of priorities” that still involves a lot more weapons flowing into Ukraine.

Chaser: The real priority shouldn’t be Ukraine at all, former defense and national security officials Elbridge A. Colby and Alexander Velez-Green write; it should be Taiwan. (Josh — and the Taiwanese — vociferously disagreed last week.)

From Jennifer Rubin’s column on threats to curricular independence — and how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is leading the way. The bill he signed this week prevents public colleges in his state from teaching any general-education courses that engage with “identity politics” or any structural racism within American institutions.

As Jen notes, where does that leave, say, Jim Crow? Well, if students want to learn about things DeSantis has banned, he says they’d better “go to Berkeley.”

Chaser: Greg Sargent writes that Floridians aren’t fleeing to California just yet. His column cheers on the parents taking a stand against book-banning in K-12 education.

If we actually kill the umpire, who are we going to yell “Kill the umpire!” at? An AI-automated strike zone?

Author and sportswriter Will Leitch reckons that MLB ump Don Denkinger, who died last week, might have been the greatest vessel of ill will in league history. His blown call at first base in 1985 changed the course of that year’s World Series and allowed the down-and-out Royals to triumph over the Cardinals.

“Nothing else Denkinger had done in his life, and nothing he would do, would eclipse that moment,” Leitch writes. “The angry, often-threatening calls and letters … hounded him the rest of his life.” The FBI had to get involved multiple times!

That gaffe wouldn’t happen today, not with replay and robots to intervene and overrule. But where’s the fun in that? Not only do we not get to love-to-hate a poor guy like Denkinger, but if a strike zone is automated, how are we supposed to learn the greatest lesson of sports: that life isn’t fair?

Chaser: No umpires? What about no fans? Sports journalist Rick Reilly wrote a mid-pandemic column about how the latter was an excellent idea.

• Education isn’t the only sticky spot for DeSantis — but columnist Henry Olsen suggests a path out of his jam over entitlements.
• Vaccine hesitancy is growing, the Editorial Board writes. Doctors will have to fight back.
• Think-tanker Mustafa Akyol writes that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan triumphed by promising to “Make Turkey Great Again.”

It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s… The Bye-Ku.

Calling balls and strikes is not

Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!