Some anthems are great for sports. You've got the Russian national anthem... 'O Canada,' how wonderful is that for hockey... but I chose the Italian national song because at my first World Cup, I saw the Italians play four times, and they won all four times - they won the championship.

Into La Bombonera danced the most agile, rhythmic, beautiful, sensuous people I have ever seen. And that was just the fans.

Without editors planning assignments and copy editors fixing mistakes, reporters quickly deteriorate into underwear guys writing blogs from their den.

Tom Seaver was let loose twice by the Mets and pitched a no-hitter for the Reds and won his 300th game for the White Sox, but he wears a Mets cap in the Hall of Fame as homage to the 1969 championship.

We all understand the economics of the Super Bowl - 10 or 12 minutes of the ball in motion will be stretched into three and a half hours or more of money-making commercials.

Hockey historians say the handshake dates to English settlers in Canada, who preached an upper-class version of sportsmanship in the 19th century. Soon, tough kids in urban and prairie rinks began imitating imagined dukes and earls of the old country.

It is no fun lining up in your own building - as the hockey players say - and touching the hands of fellow stubbly louts who have just sent you off to the proverbial cabin on the lake.

Nobody has ever called Shea Stadium a cathedral. In style, it was more like the old warehouse or outdated movie theater that Korean worshippers have transformed into a church in the borough of Queens. Not a cathedral - but a place where people go to be fulfilled, nonetheless.

Whether or not anybody had invented the category in his lifetime, Babe Ruth was surely the Greatest Living Yankee almost immediately upon lofting home runs at the Polo Grounds, allowing the Yankees to build their own palace across the Harlem River.

Under a pulsating full moon, the gussied-up Billie Jean King National Tennis Center seems much softer and prettier at night, with the fountains bubbling and fans without tickets to the big stadium sitting in the plaza and watching a big screen.

When Sweden's Jan-Ove Waldner travels to China to play table tennis, he is mobbed when he leaves his hotel as if he were a rock star walking around Manhattan or a soccer star walking around Europe.

Certain Stanley Cup traditions remain intact, including the handshake line between players who had been belting one another for a couple of weeks.

Fans all have their memories of pennant races, good memories, sick memories.

When I was a kid, my father brought home the autobiography of Sid Luckman, the great Chicago Bears quarterback - probably an extra copy from the sports department where he worked. It was the first sports biography I ever read.

It's a Stanley Cup thing. The boys mangle one another for a series, performing all kinds of nasty tricks, then they make nice, shaking soggy hands as the teams shuffle in opposite directions.

Every spring, this happens: People discover hockey when daylight lasts longer and men grow beards and tie games do not end in shootouts but rather continue until a goal is scored. The seventh game only heightens the mood for players and fans alike.

I never watch 'Sopranos' reruns back home. As far as I am concerned, the nuclear family is still sitting around the luncheonette in New Jersey, munching and chatting, safe and together, and that's how it ended for me.

I proposed abolishing boxing because it was bad for the brain, but boxers were generally so decent that I loved being around the gyms.

Weary soccer players just cannot run anymore and must resort to shootouts after 120 minutes when a result is mandatory, but men on skates can go indefinitely, no matter how badly it disrupts the television network's schedule.

Stanley Cup hockey comes around every year, when games start to count in multiples of best-of-seven series, and the players seem to put more attention into every pass, every check, every annoying little trick.

All our lives are enriched by the leadership and excellence and confidence of female athletes, whether the Mia Hamms and Maya Moores we know or the field hockey, lacrosse and track and field athletes we do not necessarily know.

To this day, while maintaining a healthy respect for the Giants and Jets and other teams I cover, I admit to checking the results every Monday to see how the Bears did.

War of attrition, war of wills. That's what the Stanley Cup playoffs are - more intense, more physical and more prolonged than the playoffs of any other sport.

I've seen elbows that broke eye sockets. I've seen a German goalkeeper just level a French guy. His teammates thought he was dead lying on the ground. This was in 1982 at my first World Cup. But a bite is outside any kind of contact collision: dirty foul play. A bite is a bite.

When the Mets were on their run in the 1980s, Gary Carter was often seen hugging somebody. It was easy to joke about that. The best hug of all was with Jesse Orosco at the end of the 1986 World Series.

In that prehistoric time, before the Internet, before information floated in the ozone, I was a soccer novice who had never heard of Socrates until somebody pointed him out - swarthy, shaggy, tall, slender, mysterious.

For good reasons, there are no ties during the Stanley Cup season. Somebody needs to win so the lads can get out to their cottages on the lakes, where all hockey players spend their summers, or so I have been told.

FIFA is a vuvuzela. It's in your ear, but you don't want to hear it, and then eventually it goes away.

There is always a group of death in any World Cup. And it's a complement in a way to be in a group of death because it means that you're a good team also.

What I like about it is the creativity. When I watch good soccer players - the way they have to make a play out of nothing.

I would never tell anybody to give up hockey - the great sports we have here - basketball, lacrosse - rugby coming into its own - we've got so many great team sports, and I say hold on to them.

Many American players - Paul Caligiuri, Claudio Reyna, Eric Wynalda, Kasey Keller, Tony Sanneh, Michael Bradley and Steve Cherundolo, just a partial list - have sought the income and challenge of Germany.

There may not be much future for the kind of sports column I did.

Newspapers are the engines that drive the Web.

There is only one thing wrong about the Flo Hyman Award: it came to be named for the Old Lady of Volleyball much too soon.

Flo Hyman became America's best-known volleyball player with a faulty aorta, but she did not know it.

Lots of ballplayers have their own personal music blasted by the sound systems in modern ball parks.

I know, I know - men have that extra hero gene in their foolish makeup; it's part of our charm. But I happen to know some women who have their inner sports hero, too.

Having been aware of the Red Sox since the 1946 World Series, having been growled at by Ted Williams as a young reporter in 1960, having been present at the horror of 1986 and the comeback of 2004, I have seen the highs and lows of some other people's favorite team.

I love Boston. I love Fenway Park. I love Red Sox history. But in no way am I a Red Sox fan.

For years, I have been harboring memories of my first major league game at a place named Ebbets Field in Brooklyn.

Sure, there were people from Missouri and Illinois who grew up Cardinals fans and migrated to New York for work or love. Cardinals fans congregate periodically at Foley's near Herald Square to root for the team of their childhood, up there on the TV screen.

In New York, I run into Packers fans who have never lived in Wisconsin, Canadiens fans who have never lived in La Belle Province, Celtics fans who admire Russell and Bird and Pierce but have no trace of a Boston accent.

Ball caps travel far and wide. They do far more than keep the sun out of your eyes or the cold off your head. Ball caps are a statement.

Yankee caps pop up all over the world, not as a statement of loyalty to that team, but as a symbol of - what? Winning 27 so-called World Series? Much of the world doesn't even play that sport.

Many of the most successful coaches and managers have come from players who never reached the highest level. The one exception seems to be basketball, where many of the greatest stars at least tried to coach a team.

What is there about basketball that makes Larry Bird or Lenny Wilkens want to coach after their playing careers are done?

Pennant races drain the energy from the best of them. Old-fashioned baseball races are to me the most grueling daily test in any sport. Gotta keep coming out, every day, in the face of looming disaster.

For years, I advised George Steinbrenner to get out of town because he dishonored my hometown with his bullying and bombast.

As my wife will attest, I do not shop casually.