Twenty years ago today, the lights went on at Chicago’s Wrigley Field for the first night game in the old park’s history. “Eight, eight, 88,” groused a disgusted Mrs. Marchman, a lifelong Cubs fan, when reminded yesterday of the infamous anniversary. The only thing that cheered her was a reminder that 8/8/88 was also the day when God was proved to be a baseball fan, as vicious, torrential downpours ruined the festivities and forced umpires to call the game in the fourth inning.

By now, with the famous ivy on Wrigley’s outfield walls, carefully manicured so as not to obscure the ads for a brand of sweat-wicking undergarments and the digital billboards mounted on the concourses, it’s pretty affected to complain about the wretched injustice of night baseball on the north side. (This is especially true for anyone who was nine years old and living in Queens when Ernie Banks and Billy Williams threw out the ceremonial first pitch at Wrigley’s first night game.) The Cubs — by which is meant what’s left of the Tribune Company — make lots of money under the lights, and so can afford to field a better team. The quaint residents of quaint Wrigleyville who held up night games for so long because they were worried about its impact on their neighborhood are largely gone, replaced by an endless horde of guys named Chad fresh from the state schools of the upper Midwest. All of this is granted.

Still — just as there are those of us who will never accept the legitimacy of the designated hitter, and those of us who fully expect that major league baseball will one day return to Brooklyn — there are those of us who, when taking in a game at Wrigley under the moon, feel not only that something has gone horribly wrong with history, but that it’s something that can be fixed. Today’s most famous Chicagoan speaks incessantly of hope and change; if he’d like to put his words to work, he could weigh in on the side of a restoration at Clark and Addison.

The main reason to wish for this isn’t as sentimental as you might think. As Bill James once noted, one of the biggest fallacies in baseball is that the game doesn’t have a clock. For most of its history, it did: It was called the sun. Games started in the afternoon, under natural light, and had to be played briskly so they could finish by the time dark crept up over the yard. Played under this natural rhythm, a ball game takes an hour-and-a-half to two hours, and it is, as a spectacle, something entirely different from the bloated game of today.

For 40 years, Wrigley Field was the one place where major league baseball could be watched as it was actually and literally meant to be played. From the time the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues first played under the lights in 1930, it was clearly inevitable that the innovation would take hold, and, by 1948, Tiger Stadium was lit up, leaving Wrigley the last holdout. This was the result of no preservationist impulses on anyone’s part. The Cubs actually bought lights in 1941, only to end up handing them over to the War Department after Pearl Harbor. And neighborhood objections to drunks and traffic, as much as anything else, kept them from installing lights in the following decades. As things worked out, though, the oldest park in the National League was also, for nearly half a century, the only one to present baseball unadulterated, in something near the way that John McGraw and Ty Cobb experienced it.

There are many reasons why it’s impossible by now to go back to the way things were, not least the needs of playoff broadcasters, which were at least the proximate cause of the installation of lights to begin with. (The Cubs began to fight various Illinois and Chicago laws outlawing night games at Wrigley only after central baseball informed them in 1984 that they’d lose home field advantage in the World Series because they couldn’t play night games.) There are also many reasons why baseball will never be rid of the designated hitter — the union would never stand for the replacement of high-salaried players such as Jim Thome by scrub pinch-hitters — and why there probably won’t ever again be a team in Brooklyn.

There’s hope yet, though. I have no idea how it might happen, but it took 58 years to put lights on the roof at Wrigley, and even if it takes 58 more years, they still may come down and leave one place where people can be reminded that a baseball game is supposed to last the length of three beers on a summer afternoon. On Friday night, at least, we can hope for more vicious and torrential downpours, as proof that crabby baseball fans aren’t alone in their displeasure.

tmarchman@nysun.com