Sweet Caroline (Kennedy)

Unlike the gossipy “You’re So Vain,” we didn’t really care who inspired the Neil Diamond hit, and Red Sox fan favorite, “Sweet Caroline.” We just like to sing it with 36,000 of our closest friends in the middle of the eighth. However, the singer-songwriter has revealed the inspiration for his song, and it makes us kind of uncomfortable.

Neil Diamond held onto the secret for decades, but he has finally revealed that President Kennedy’s daughter was the inspiration for his smash hit “Sweet Caroline.” . . .

Diamond was a “young, broke songwriter” when a photo of the president’s daughter in a news magazine caught his eye.

“It was a picture of a little girl dressed to the nines in her riding gear, next to her pony,” Diamond recalled. “It was such an innocent, wonderful picture, I immediately felt there was a song in there.”

Ew. Neil Diamond is 17 years older than Caroline Kennedy, so to have lyrics like “I look at the night/and it don’t seem so lonely/we fill it up with only two” inspired by a girl who was probably five or six when they were written kind of skeeves us out. It doesn’t mean we’re not going to scream our fool heads off when they play it at Fenway Park, but we would have been happier never knowing.

Now we don’t want to know what Carly Simon’s inspiration was, either. We’re afraid it was a kindergartener.