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We're still just over a day since seeing one of baseball's brightest lights extinguished in Marlins starting pitcher Jose Fernandez. It's every sad word we could possible come up with: Heartbreaking, gut-crushing, horrible, tragic ...

And yet, in trying to look back on the positive that was Jose Fernandez, I can't help but think that the greatest way for MLB players to honor and memorialize Fernandez is to play the game how he did. He was the guy always having fun. Just look at this tweet from Dodgers starter Brandon McCarthy.

As he was fighting off tears, Marlins manager Don Mattingly mentioned Fernandez's youthful joy of the game several times in what had to be his toughest press conference of all-time. He said it was like watching Little Leaguers, from the point of view of how much fun Fernandez had playing the game.

No matter how many times we've already seen this GIF of Jose, it's worth another look:

That was vintage Jose. As was this:

Hell, here at CBS Sports, we dedicated an entire article to his infectious smile.

Even when the other team was mad and wanting to fight him, Jose was all smiles:

Again, maybe this is where we can all learn something here. Marlins president David Samson said during Sunday's press conference of Fernandez: "He would often tell me, 'you don't really understand what freedom is because you were born into freedom.'"

Born in Cuba, it took Fernandez and his mother four attempts to escape in the middle of the night on a boat through the Gulf of Mexico to America. He became a U.S. citizen in 2015. He had a perspective so many of us could never fathom, and perhaps that's why -- while he was a serious competitor on the mound -- he was always about having fun while playing a game for a living.

Too often professional sports bring out the ugliness in people. Whether it's the players getting in silly fights over petty nonsense like an opposing player being excited, anger at an umpire or a referee for making an honest mistake or even an opposing player looking in one's direction. This filters down to the fans and media and we can have all kinds of heated arguments about things that probably don't ultimately matter too much in the grand scheme of things.

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Sometimes, pro athletes can take themselves a little too seriously. USATSI

This is a game. It's entertainment. It's supposed to be fun.

I wouldn't pretend to know "what Jose would've wanted," because I didn't have the pleasure of knowing him. I know what I saw, though. I saw a player who always made it a point to have fun while doing his job, likely because he knew full well how lucky he was to have such a job -- especially given what he went through just to get there.

As such, one of the best ways to remember him would be to make an effort to play like him. To professional athletes, especially baseball players, stop with this fake-tough guy machismo where you freak out if an opposing player does something that doesn't fit your "play the right way" mindset. Realize how fortunate you are to get to play such a wonderful game for a living and enjoy it.

As for the fans, we should definitely continue to enjoy our favorite teams and players, but maybe we don't need to be so angry at the others when something doesn't break exactly how we hoped it would. It's still entertainment and a nice distraction from everyday life. It's fun and can be relatively important from certain points of view, but I'm not sure it's worth some of the vile hatred we so often see on the Internet or witness first-hand in a ballpark.

We're supposed to be enjoying life, right?

Life is too short not to. If we learned anything from Jose, please let it be this.