BIG CITY, SMALL TOWN.

For the past ten years I have been a proud participant in the oldest established pickup basketball game in New York City. The history of The Game goes back decades. I'm told there has been a game, weather permitting (and sometimes even when it's not weather-permitting), for some twenty-five years. The tradition continues each Saturday beginning at 8:30 a.m. at Crowley Park, near the site of the former gas tanks next to the Long Island Expressway in Elmhurst, Queens. (You better come earlier if you want to get a game in the good weather, however, and be prepared to sustain some minor bruises, scratches, and an occasional elbow in the gut if you dare go near the basket.)

For much of my first four years with The Game, I would report to my spouse stories about the dozen or so regulars. There was the Jewish real estate guy with the great outside shot; the Chinese computer techie whose game kept getting better; the Panamanian with a quick move to the basket.

I would describe them, using ethnic "handles" and occupations, and my wife would look dumbfounded. "You don't even know most of those guys' names, do you?" She was right, I sheepishly admitted.

A female friend told me how different the socializing would be if The Game were an all-women activity. "We would have had a contact list. We would have already invited everyone over for tea. We would have had them meet our children."

Guys move a little slowly on the social front, however. And it has always been a kind of big-city tradition. There are lots of people you come in contact with in New York. They are part of the landscape, in some ways a regular part of your life, like the newsstand vendor you buy the Post from every morning. Yet most times you never trouble to know their names.

Still, by the fifth year or so of my participation in The Game, I had gotten to know all the regulars' names. At least their first names. And we actually had conversations.

Ever so slowly, I began to find out that these guys had lives beyond the hard court. When Benny died, a guy who I'm told played for NYU back in the '40s and practiced the art of trash-talking to perfection, we heard about it. Benny was Jewish, however, and so the ancient custom of quick burial applied. We didn't make the funeral.

But when we heard of the death of the young daughter of Joe, the Italian Catholic, most of us made it to the wake in a show of solidarity appreciated by our grieving fellow weekend warrior.

The glimpses of other outside lives also began to emerge. Curtis, our tallest player, moved to Oklahoma for a year, only to return after his wife passed away. He worked as an accountant downtown.

As I got to know them, they got to know about me. Once, I let on that I wrote for Catholic publications and, for weeks, my moniker was "Father." My foul calls were argued with accusations that, as a Catholic writer, I was just maybe a wee bit hypocritical to unjustly accuse others of rule violations.

As my son got older and taller--he is now a college sophomore--I involved him in The Game. John, the guy from Brooklyn who pedals his bike over every weekend, would teach my gangly boy how to assert himself under the boards. And so it continued.

It has been hyperbolically asserted in the weeks after September 11 that everything about life in New York would change. Not quite. The Game continues, I can attest.

Yet there is a different edge. Last week someone asked, "Where's Curtis?" And then another asked, "Where's John?" They are simple questions. But such routine inquiries in today's New York are no longer so simple. We haven't seen those guys since before September 11.

They might be on vacation. They might just be sleeping in late on weekend mornings. They just might have gotten tired over all the foul calls and bickering that have marked The Game since its inception. Maybe it's possible that someone could actually get tired of basketball, unlikely as that might seem to the rest of us.

Still, in the back of our minds is the thought that maybe they were in the wrong place at the wrong time on a sunny New York morning a few weeks ago. It is a thought too horrible to contemplate aloud. Nobody mentions it, but I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking it.

Every Saturday morning I look for John and Curtis to show up. I hope it happens next week. Until then, I just wish I had bothered to break through the anonymity of big-city life at least once and gotten a phone number or a last name.

Before September 11, who would have thought such information would have loomed so large? Curtis and John, if you are out there, The Game is waiting.

Peter Feuerherd writes frequently for Commonweal.