The late-great comedian George Carlin used to do a wonderful routine comparing football and baseball . The former (football) was full of martial reference; the latter was all light and gentle, scented with spring and softness.

“In football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use shotgun … ”

“In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe! I hope I’ll be safe at home!”

In all the hoopla surrounding the news that former Red Sox star Nomar Garciaparra signed a one-day contract in order to retire with his former team, no one has asked the former Sox Star if he was influenced by Carlin’s routine.

But who needs to ask, really?

Like E.T., somewhere in his heart and mind the former darling of Red Sox Nation heard the words, “Nomie phone home.” And he did.

‘Course, Boston was only home to Garciaparra in the baseball sense.

He came up in the Red Sox organization, one of the most talented home-grown farm products in the team’s history.

But Garciaparra was always a California boy: The laid-back persona, the soccer background, the penchant for privacy and discomfort with the media that he shared with fellow Whittier (CA) homeboy, Richard Nixon.

Ironically, Garciaparra could have retired with either of the last two teams he played for (L.A. Dodgers, Oakland A’s), and have truly ended the day safe at home.

But there clearly was a tug. A fond remembrance perhaps of one’s early days. Perhaps something about roots.

In his retirement announcement, there was something about roots, too, for the much of the media who covered Garciaparra in Boston.

As in recalling a root canal.

It was often a grueling ordeal that involved wariness, anxiety, pain and extreme discomfort.

And that was just for Garciaparra.

I never covered him or the team, but I interviewed him once in the Sox clubhouse. As (bad) luck would have it, it was after a particularly frustrating late-inning loss. Fortunately, it was for a story on Fenway Park. Safe.

I circled his locker several times. He took no notice. I quietly murmured, “Um, Nomar? One question -- not about the game.”

He looked up. I tossed my puffball about his first impressions of the Green Monster. He quietly talked for several minutes.

But that was the exception. The beat reporters who traveled with the team got a different Garciaparra.

In time, his surly aloofness metastasized into outright hostility and unhappiness. By the time he was traded at the deadline in 2004, many of those reporters described his very presence in that same clubhouse as a “cancer” on the morale of the team.

Young General Manager Theo Epstein wasted no time on a biopsy. He risked the wrath of the fans, went into emergency mode, excised the cancer, and traded Nomar to the Chicago Cubs.

(The patient, as you may recall, recovered nicely and won its first World Championship in 86 years.)

Despite five more injury-plagued seasons elsewhere, Garciaparra’s best days were behind him, and in Boston.

So in hanging it up, he first phoned home. To retire as a Red Sox.

Was it a Hallmark moment, a sensitive gesture of the team “extending the circle of warmth,” as the Boston Globe opined?

Or, considering Garciaparra’s stormy tenure here, was it a “total fraud,” “a move of historically bad taste,” and “truly nauseating,” as longtime Sox observer (and Boston Globe reporter) Dan Shaughnessy sees it?

Maybe a little bit of both. Whatever his motives, whatever went before, a man wanted to go home.

After all, as that quintessential New Englander, Robert Frost defined it, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

Even if it’s just for a day.