One April, oh so long ago, a former co-worker informed me that Denver Broncos wide receiver Ed McCaffrey was in The Gazette lobby, along with some other players, for unknown reasons, but maybe related to our sports department.

Knowing full well of my innocent little crush on the tall, lanky guy who seemed to pluck footballs from the sky, she suggested I take a peek.

And your girl, with stars in her eyes, didn’t think twice. She headed to the lobby post-haste, ready to feast her lovestruck gaze on the only professional sports player, even to this day, she’s ever crushed on.

I didn’t get far before I heard my co-worker snicker.

“April Fool’s!” she cawed, beside herself with joy at my naivety.

Deflated, I pasted on a smile and slunk back to my desk, cheeks red with embarrassment.

Hot take: April Fool’s Day is the worst. An abomination to humankind. An unnecessary cruelty when the world is already stocked up on viciousness.

I’m not always so easily bamboozled, but when a prank comes from friends or family who target your specific quirks or know your Achilles heels, it’s much more challenging to ferret out the lies from the truths.

There was one boyfriend who was particularly good at unnerving me, and probably spent the six months before April 1 dreaming up scenarios that sent my cortisol skyrocketing.

I don’t think he intended to be mean; he genuinely thought it was funny to fool me. Like the time he told me early on in our relationship that he was quitting his job and going on the road with a band (he was a musician), or the year he said he was going to enroll full time in professional wrestling school. That one clearly sounds like a joke, I admit, but if you knew him, you’d know it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.

Last year, I also believed him when he unspooled a salacious story about him and some co-workers. That one didn’t stress me out, as we are many years removed from romance, and my only reaction was astonishment and scolding him until he came clean.

Hornswoggled yet again.

My brother tried to get me once, telling me he and his wife had accidentally gotten pregnant, and I would have a third niece or nephew. But my flimflam meter kicked in that year.

April Fool’s Day has bedeviled us for centuries. Apparently, humans just like making other humans the butt of jokes, and there’s no official explanation to how the holiday came about.

Some believe it stretches back to 1582, when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. The Julian calendar marked April 1 as the new year, while the latter noted it as Jan. 1. Those who didn’t catch the date change got made fun of and pranked.

Some also say April Fool’s Day was linked to the spring equinox, when Mother Nature fooled us with her capricious weather.

No matter how it came to us, I would like to send it back for a refund. A refund for all my embarrassment through the decades. A refund for my heightened anxiety, of which I do not need more, thank you very much. A refund for the time wasted on having to decipher if something was real or phony.

Every year, without fail, I receive ridiculous work emails from companies and organizations purporting inane news that is patently false and really not even funny. Editors remind us to gnaw ginormous grains of salt as the informal holiday approaches – don’t chase or print fake news.

I know, I know, I sound like a Sour Patch Kid who sits at home eating Saltines with all the blinds closed. But I love a good guffaw. A belly laugh between friends is aces. It’s just humor at other people’s expense, I don’t care for. Pranks are mean. “Punk’d,” Ashton Kutcher’s practical joke reality show on MTV in the early 2000s, was callous. Making other people look and feel small makes you look small, too.

And April Fool’s jokes typically aren’t really that funny, even when they’re not mean-spirited, though Gov. Jared Polis sharing his new portrait at the state Capitol building last year that depicted him as a “South Park” character was worthy of a small smile. Pranking yourself? Acceptable.

I haven’t always felt this way. I, too, liked a good prank. Years ago, a friend and I thought it would be fun to do social experiments with people, like plopping ourselves down right next to a stranger on a park bench, just to see how they’d react. I told my mom about this idea, and she reacted viscerally, a hard no. I was taken aback, but now I see the park bench sit was an uncharitable idea, and that it wouldn’t feel great if I were on the receiving end of such an experiment.

History is lush with April Fool’s pranks, like the great spaghetti incident of 1957, when a BBC TV show highlighted how the Swiss were finally able to grow spaghetti on trees, thanks to the eradication of the ominous spaghetti weevil. Many pasta and foliage lovers phoned in, wanting to know how they, too, could grow a spaghetti tree. Kind of funny, but definitely at the expense of dewy-eyed viewers.

The BBC struck again in 1965, when it told viewers they were doing a trial of new technology that allowed the transmission of smell over the airwaves. Many watchers contacted the broadcaster to report that the trial had been a success, and they could smell the odor. Again, begrudgingly silly in retrospect, but unnecessarily mean.

And in 1980, a Boston TV station aired a fake bulletin at the end of the news that said the Great Blue Hill in Milton, Mass., was erupting. Panic ensued, and residents began to flee. The executive producer was rightly fired. Terrible on all counts. What were they thinking?

The list of pranks gone wild is long. I hope, by reading this, you’ll keep your wits about you on Wednesday and wave off anyone who dares tell you the Balanced Rock in Garden of the Gods has tipped over, or that NASA is building a shuttle launch pad at the Air Force Academy. Lies, all lies.