The speed-dating part is easy. A minute into a great conversation, another former colleague would tap you on the shoulder, and it was time to start over.

By a 40th reunion, a friend explained, you no longer feel the need to tell everybody how fabulous the career is going. You're just happy to see everyone alive and well.

They came from Brookline and Bolivia to embrace fellow members of the Gene Roberts era, 1972 to 1990, also known as the Glory Days, a term that, even whispered, gives me an ice-cream headache.

It was a storied era, all right - camels in the service elevator, frogs in the editor's bathroom. There was time left over for the sort of singular journalism that won 17 Pulitzer Prizes in 18 years.

Arriving in 1988, I was here for the end of that party, and I sometimes wondered if they were starting to run out of dip.

I got assigned to the old Northeast Neighbors, and volunteered for what turned out to be three years of weekend duty in hopes of breaking into the Sunday paper. My memory, probably a little exaggerated, was of making cop checks as others went to parties.

In fact, I had put my money down at the last moment, a little too sensitive to some of the elbows thrown unwittingly by those who posted personal updates on a reunion blog, complaining about the thinness of the paper these days. Perhaps they wish to buy an ad.

I keep thinking of that scene in Atlantic City when Burt Lancaster celebrated the past, saying, "You should have seen the ocean then."

Skits about the old days were about to start. T-shirts were for sale - Tony Auth-drawn dinosaurs in party hats singing, "Those were the days, my friend. We thought they'd never end."

The shirt I coveted, though, was sported by John Woestendieck, who had recently taken a buyout from the Baltimore Sun. From a 1996 Inquirer series, it read: "Who stole the dream?" I'm higher on outrage than nostalgia.

The good news for the party was that there's bad news all around. No one was feeling the least bit smug. The Washington Post just bought out more than 100 journalists. The Los Angeles Times is about to lose 150.

Even the New York Times men and women in attendance groused about the changes rocking the industry - the disappearing ad revenue, the changing business model, the economy in general.

What won my admiration was the way we jumped on the news that the Spectrum will go the way of Shibe Park. The package we produced showed what a newspaper can do in a day.

Next to Frank Fitzpatrick's main obit of an arena that, like its teams, fell victim to a rebuilding project, Bill Lyon conjured the soul of the place of triumph and dashed hopes. Bob Ford complained about the bathrooms.

Dan DeLuca took us back to his favorite show there: Bruce Springsteen on Dec. 9, 1980, the night after John Lennon's murder. Time lines hit a wealth of its highlights: Joe Frazier knockouts, Sinatra and Grateful Dead shows, Christian Laettner's buzzer-beater, Flyers and Sixers banners.

Those filled just a few of the 50 pages of news about Bush's bullishness on the economy, trends in big-cup bras, and grabby scoops like the one about Canada's coming to recruit our recent immigrants.

It's a bargain still for 75 cents. The world brought somewhere near your doorstep for less than a hot dog at the Spectrum.