Had a dream last night about hockey, about the Flyers playing someone, the Rangers I think, and M. R. was in it, he being a Flyers fan. When I awoke I tried to remember the score, wondering if by some magic the news report on the morning radio, WBGO in Newark, would mirror it. I thought maybe the Flyers had won 5-3, or 5-0, but that didn’t seem quite right. Doug Doyle was prattling on about something Governor Murphy said, something about vaccines, this, that, the other thing. Soon he’d sign off with weather and sports. There was something unusual about the score in my dream, I was sure of it. And then at the end he announced that the Rangers had beaten the Flyers 9-0.

 

I gazed up at the rafters in Madison Square Garden as Robert Smith sang “Friday I’m in Love.” The retired Ranger numbers, jersey style, red and blue on white, floated incongruously over the far end of the arena. The names did too. Names from other times and places. Graves. Gilbert. Messier. I thought about what it meant to retire a number. A great honor, blah blah blah. What it really means is this: If we retire one, we’re going to have to retire them all. Given enough time, and enough acts of athletic heroism, all the other numbers will eventually ascend into that celestial realm. And then what?