If you could go home again, would you want to? The service bays of Sullivan Tire, persistent in their comforting dinginess, might be the only thing recognizable to a visitor from the late 1980s to the stretch of Commonwealth Avenue where resides the western half of an awfully gussied-up Boston University.
Everything else is as new and sleek, as well lit and amply signaged, as the Las Vegas Strip. The eateries? Admittedly attractive, though it pained me to note the absence of my once-favorite luncheonette, the length and width of a subway car and about as clean. The stores? Target is conceivably useful to today’s college student. But it’s Target.
The gleaming athletics facilities? Now you’re talking; these are indeed welcome upgrades, in particular the university’s Track and Tennis Center — the launching pad, the world’s fastest indoor racing circuit, its curves banked at 18.5 degrees, its 200 meters a “tuned interface between structure and deck that provides greater rebound,” in the words of a B.U. website, rendering runners’ footfalls unto the low thrumming of a dramatic and ear-pleasing stampede.
How fast is it? Last year a world record for most sub-4-minute miles run in one meet was set there — 52 of them.
We were there to see our daughter, a top Division III runner, at the David Hemery Valentine Invitational, the indoor season’s number-one college meet, hanging and banging with the big boys, uh, girls, er, women, those from the mammoth schools, the richly funded programs, gamely holding her own among the faster sections of the 5K.
This was a surgical strike of a visit, which is sometimes the best kind — in, out, supermarket food on the cheap, paper cups of mediocre coffee knocked back, a quick and effective catching up, nothing belabored.
Besides, she was busy. There were so many heats on the first day of the meet that it didn’t wrap up till after 10 at night. In one way this is for the better, as the circadian rhythms will lend a boost to the evening runner, our daughter being one of them.
Those fans with elbows propped atop the railing for a closer look, however, will understandably require some sustenance after a whole lot of standing. But then a trip to the facility’s recesses for an after-hours snack left a bag of Pepperidge Farm Cheddar Goldfish hung up in a vending machine — pendulous, right on the edge, tantalizingly just out of reach, and too many people around to slam or shake it loose.
Some things never change.