Almost 30 years ago, my then-boss at the then-Monona Community Herald wrote a story about a group of old baseball players, beginning with a line from Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days”:

Well, time slips away and leaves you with nothing mister …

“Glory Days” is deceptively up-tempo for the subject matter — a former high school baseball hero, a woman who split with her husband, the narrator’s unemployed father and the narrator “sitting back trying to recapture a little of the glory of …”

This comes up for two reasons. The annual University of Wisconsin Varsity Band Concert is tonight and Saturday night at the Kohl Center in Madison. Which requires this commercial interruption from Facebook and UW Band director Mike Leckrone:

We have tickets to Saturday night.

My weight loss over the past few years means that, remarkably, I can wear my UW Band jacket and the band sweater I wore my last four years in the band (the design changed after my freshman year) since I weigh a few pounds more than I did when I graduated from UW in 1988. (We won’t discuss the state of the body parts required for marching, because of The March Of Time!) And as you know, I have a retired UW Band trumpet, from my father for a Father’s Day, the gift of which I have repaid by not playing it in my parents’ presence, but playing at two Episcopal churches, neither of which threw me out after playing, for some odd reason. (Forgiveness, I guess.)

To demonstrate how ingrained the band became in my brain: On Tuesday night, I had yet another Band Dream. I discovered that I was playing in the Varsity Band Concert that night. I had a trumpet, and apparently whatever I was wearing was sufficient for the concert, though I lacked one important additional item — music.

Well, there was one more thing I lacked — the schedule. I got up to visit the bathroom (something I do before broadcasts, to avoid having to arrive at intermission before intermission is supposed to arrive), and while I was there I heard the band play the first notes of the opening of “On Wisconsin.” (Which changes every year, by the way. This year is fanfare number 46.) I was trying to figure out how to sneak onto the stage where I was supposed to sit and play when I woke up.

I have had that dream, or the marching band variation of that dream, far more often than any other college-related dream, most recently two months ago. (Even stranger: While I was in college I had a dream that the band was going to get its own dorm. Ponder that one, readers from the ’80s.)

Long-time readers have read more than they probably wanted to about how central the band was in my life. Before the first game I marched, another band member and I went to the McDonald’s closest to Camp Randall Stadium, in uniform, for lunch. I felt like a rock star given the reaction of people in the restaurant.

It’s interesting to me (and probably no one else, but you’re reading this, so …) that as someone who has felt compelled most of my life to be an independent thinker, to be an individual and to not just blend in, that I was happy to blend in to the band. My first ambition was to just get in, since there were more people trying out for the band than there would be members of the 1983 Marching Band. Once I found out that not everyone in the band marches every pregame and every halftime, my lone ambition was to march every pregame and every halftime. And I did — 39 pregames and 39 halftimes in five years.

I didn’t ever solo, because I wasn’t that good a trumpet player. (Or perhaps just “good,” though I could and did play loudly and with sufficient spacing and what Leckrone called “INERGY!”) I have a hard time believing I was much of a marcher either because of my appalling lack of athletic ability. (And yet I dropped my music once and never dropped my trumpet in five years in Camp Randall and other football stadiums, even with national TV cameras in my face.) I had a job, and I did my job.

My guess is that there will be more than one reference to the Final Four …

… where by NCAA rules only 30 members could play. (Ten times that number will play at the Kohl Center.)

This exercise in nostalgia is prompted by something else too, which is not happy.

In the foreground of this photo are three members of Rank 1 in the 1980s — (from left) Tom Baitinger, Pat Bork and Steve Semmann. Steve died of brain cancer in 2009. Tom was a St. Petersburg, Fla., police sergeant who died while serving a warrant in 2011. And earlier this week came the news that Pat died of a stroke.

I wouldn’t say we were friends, but we shared the same experiences of the band in the ’80s — a football team that went to three bowl games in four years, and then none for nine years; a basketball team that never went anywhere; a hockey team that was good, but (at least while I was there) wasn’t good enough to get to the Frozen Four; and balancing band with all of our other college responsibilities. And yet the UW was more fun than real life, as 100 percent of UW students have discovered.

I’m aware of three other members of the band in my day who died a few years after my graduation. A field assistant, Bill Garvey, the long-time director of the McFarland High School band, died of cancer in 2012, after he got to march with his daughter in the 2012 Rose Bowl parade. The long-time band announcer (and, for lack of a better term, executive assistant), Jack Rane, died after the 1994 Rose Bowl. Just a year ago, Gail Johnson, the long time band secretary, died.

Bill’s wife, Michelle, wrote on Facebook, “Please remember that life is a gift. RIP Pat and know that Bill will be waiting for you with his great smile and a big huge hug!”

And that’s a good place to end this. On Wisconsin.