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.

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