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NASCAR is going to have a Monster year. That much we know. We don’t know if it’s going to be monster like King Kong or a monster like the wall in left at Fenway Park. We know that David Ortiz isn’t going to have a monster year, but we don’t know about Clint Bowyer. We know the odds favor Jimmie Johnson, for, as Bob Seger never sang but discarded, Seven out of 11 ain’t bad.

Two out of three just had a better ring. The syllables fell just right.

The new sponsor is an energy drink more hip than coffee. The good news is apparently that kids love it. The bad news is that it isn’t likely to remedy that short attention span everyone talks about.

There’s an excellent chance Monster Energy Drink is the best NASCAR can do. Supposedly, this is the way business works.

I’ve already written several times about how NASCAR has disappeared from the collective consciousness of the kids I talk to while I’m covering their ballgames. It was not always so. NASCAR became so last decade. Today Jimmie Johnson ranks somewhere below Manchester United and Harambe. The kids I see who like NASCAR generally are the ones whose daddies or older brothers are racing at the local dirt track. If it’s not in their family, it’s not on their radar.

Perhaps Monster Energy is. I doubt they’re going to turn up on NASCAR – i.e., get turnt -- just because black cans have green letters that glow in the dark.

To get NASCAR back on their radar, it’s got to get back in their families.

Kids are 80 percent the same, from one generation to the next. The 20 percent gets magnified by those of us who are older.

Here’s what I don’t believe has changed. To develop a lifelong love of automobile racing, one has to see it live. NASCAR may care more about TV ratings than live attendance, but the former is going to continue to sag as long as the latter does.

If the decision had been mine, all those grandstands wouldn’t have been dismantled at the great speedways of the land. The parking lots behind the back straight would have been filled with schoolbuses and church vans. Boy Scouts would have marched through the triovals. Shriners would have performed their choreographed slingshots in tiny cars. The model promoter would be a Humpy Wheeler again.

The Webelos Scouts, the Campfire Girls, the Royal Ambassadors and the Future Farmers of America would be admitted for five bucks a head in the seats no one else wants anymore.

NASCAR needs what politicians call a ground game. A lot of football teams need one, too, but that’s another subject.

I went to the Volunteer 500 of 1965, at a mature seven years of age, and slept with four others in a ’64 Plymouth that Ralph Barnes owned because he loved Richard Petty. Jarrett won it. Ned Jarrett. Fearless Fred Lorenzen drove the prettiest race car I’ve ever seen. I was a kid, and they called Freddie “the Golden Boy” and “the Elmhurst Express,” and the white on that Galaxie sparkled like glitter in the blistering sun.

I was hooked and remain so today. Pretty soon I was begging my daddy to take me to the 200-lappers at Greenville-Pickens Speedway and the grueling marathons at Darlington.

The central problem NASCAR faces is that loves have dwindled to likes, and sitting on the edge of the seat, loving every lap, has turned into trying to remember to check on the race if the Pats get one more touchdown ahead.

That has got to change, or else it’s going to get even harder to figure out where in tarnation the race is on Dish Network.