Maybe it was a mistake to offer to fill in at wing for the girls' soccer match. But after flubbing a couple, you execute a competent kick. The opposing halfback reverses the advance nicely. Like you he is a boy, only better.

If you weren't busy dodging humiliation, it might strike you funny how the playing field, instead of bordering a school, sits by the river that flowed past the house where you grew up.

Walking your team's coltish sweeper back to campus, you feel relief when her passage through your decrepit neighborhood seems to transform it for the better, house by house. You are not spooked by this generous special effect; it is feeble magic beside the miracle of her company.

To end a silence you ask where she is from. "Poughkeepsie," she answers, a beautiful name. There is such a place, you know.

When she sidles over the sill of her dorm window, the flesh above the uniform's blue and white socks looks heavier than in her elfin girlhood. But they are her thighs and beautiful and the clue goes unexamined.

Then, in good-bye, she smiles, parting lips that teach what symmetry does and means. Your repartee must have been good enough after all.

First thing the next morning you check your in-box to see if she has written. She has not. That's because the last time you saw her was 30 years ago, and you said nothing then not even hello. You never walked her home.

When you wake up again, this time for good, you calculate it is not 30 years since you saw her it is 45; but you really are friends on Facebook.