I come to praise the Orange Bowl. I'm not crazy. Listen.

The papers have been full of OB farewells recently, and they have not been affectionate ones. The Dolphins are moving north next year, leaving the Hurricanes and the New Year's game the only attractions at the Bowl, and speculation runs that they, too, will follow Joe Robbie and the demographics to the site near the Broward line.

The consensus is that this is a good thing, that it serves the Orange Bowl right because it is a bad place and we deserve better.

I have a suspicion that we indeed deserve the new stadium. But I don't think newer is better in this case, and I think it will serve us right to have to go there, because we're a fickle crowd.

First, the grim truths:

Picture the ball park: It's rusting and rickety and it thumps with age. It is located almost in the center of the city, jammed into a mixed residential / commercial neighborhood; the search for a parking spot would give Odysseus pause. Its bowels are dank. The ramps run wet with spilled beer and other, less palatable liquids. The seats are narrow, and some of them absurdly obstructed. Unless you sit on an aisle, pushing out for a trek to the rest rooms is a nightmare, and once you get to those restrooms the nightmare lingers. Long lines, unspeakable behavior inside. The concessions are rudimentary, and you have to wait a good long time for them, too. The scoreboard looks like a throwback, the public address system is a whistle in the wind.

I'm talking about Fenway Park in Boston, where the Red Sox play. All these things are also true of the Orange Bowl, of course, but I was thinking of Fenway.

The OB isn't modern, but its failings are hardly unique. At Fenway, for instance, the parking situation makes the Orange Bowl, in its congenial Little Havana environs, look like a grand design. In the men's rooms there are no urinals; there are 20- foot troughs. Quick service, yes -- but at what cost to aesthetics? The last time I sat in Fenway, in June, I "watched" Roger Clemens win his 13th from behind an imposing girder. About all I could clearly see was that the upper deck was in no imminent danger of falling.

So what is the big difference between Fenway Park and the Orange Bowl?

In Boston, they love Fenway Park. They do not use the park's decrepitude as an excuse for staying home. To the contrary, they revel in its age. The place is honored. Try to move it to a field near the New Hampshire border, they'd lynch you on the spot.

This is hardly news to hard-core sports fans. The old places such as Fenway, and Wrigley Field in Chicago -- where they don't even have lights yet -- are spoken of as hallowed ground.

But this is not a sports issue, not really. Get a Bostonian to take you on a tour of his city, which fairly groans under its history, and he will surely spin you by Fenway.Fenway's history is actually pretty grim -- the Sox haven't won a World Series there since 1918, and in the modern era the park has been the scene mostly of epic collapse by talented teams. There has never been anything in Fenway to match the Dolphins' undefeated season or the Hurricanes' national championship game in the Orange Bowl.

And still. In Boston, they just love the park. Here, we don't even bother to hate the Orange Bowl any longer. Now we merely hold it in contempt.

It's a plague on "new" places such as South Florida that inhabitants rather casually assume there is no history to them, in the face of evidence to the contrary. South Florida is a particularly new place, though it's considerably older than the Orange Bowl, which we think of as antiquated. Yet the Bowl is one of the most celebrated buildings in the state. On my own city tours for visiting friends and relatives, I'm always asked about the Orange Bowl. Usually I solve that by driving the tourists over the big hump on 836, heading east, so they can get the full impact of the Miami River cleaving the city and the Bowl rising out of its low-rise neighborhood. A couple times I've had to take the visitors down to the east end of the stadium itself, for a peek inside. Invariably, lots of oohs and aahs.

I have my own memories of the place. The best, of course, was the New Year's night when UM and Nebraska played The Game, and the placed rocked and thundered so it sent chills up your spine. The most vivid, though, was the first time I walked up the ramp and got a look at the interior, on a Friday night in 1964. All that green, all that space, and out the east end zone the city skyline. The Orange Bowl displaced Yankee Stadium and Ebbetts Field in my mind.

What I recall about that night was that I didn't much care whether UM played a game or not. The OB was very much a structure of its city; you knew where you were -- Miami, unmistakably. I was new to the city; it was the first time I'd made some sort of connection with the place.

I was struck then and remain so now by the Bowl's odd grace, the correctness of its position. It is impressive looking, and from the outside has a dignity about it. It's a fine old stadium, not a cookie-cutter job. It helps define its part of the city, and it offers an almost sublime relief to the high-rise skyline to the east that has climbed so in the last 10 years. It says: This is a distinctive place, you're nowhere else but here.

Maybe, you say, it's just that I've had a good time there all these years. No. We haven't had to wait as long as Red Sox fans, but there were more bad times than good in the Bowl for the Hurricanes. All too many Fridays and Saturdays, the only redeeming element was the Bowl itself.

But we have problems with history here. Beth Dunlop, in her remarkable series on what she called "Vanishing Florida, " was basically describing a state and a people in such a hurry to grow that they lay waste to the best of that history. Sure enough, you hear people talk about the OB, you hear a kind of glee. Get rid of it!

Nothing much to be done now, of course. The Dolphins have their own reasons for moving north, which is to say Joe Robbie does. The new stadium will certainly be more comfortable. But it will have nothing to do with this town.

We're surely going to miss the Orange Bowl, once it, too, has been consigned to rot. It's cranky and old -- like a lot of us, actually -- and it has character. So don't laugh. With the OB will go another piece of Miami, a pack of excuses for Dolphin no-shows, a piece of our history.

It seems a stiff price to pay for easy parking.