This is where I’m supposed to weigh in on the swimmers of Penn. As it happens, I have all the necessary background to do exactly that. Ten members of my family, including my father and and his father, went to the University of Pennsylvania. Also, I went to Mercersburg Academy, a very serious swimming school. When I was a freshman at the Academy, we had two champion swimmers, both of whom went to Harvard. One became the captain of the Harvard swimming team. The other slept with a Kennedy girl. He went on to become a VP of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He was dumb as a fucking post and built like a brick shithouse. Could any woman anywhere, ever, beat him in a 50 meter freestyle sprint? No. Not a chance. Credentials for comment? Yeah. If there is any sport in the world where women are at a permanent disadvantage, it’s swimming. I kid you not. Well, there’s also all the track and field events, tennis, hockey, basketball, football, baseball, bicycling, and soccer. But swimming is where it ...

  The Zig Zag Machine.

Ah but why? This isn’t even a matter of (in)fidelity, darlings. My soulmate and I acquired a pair of dogs, both sweet, both mutts, both with issues. We’ve never done the mutt thing before in our many years together. Nine greyhounds, veterans of the track with tattooed ears and automatic submission to the occasionally necessary, always temporary, muzzle. Some of them needed to learn how not to eat your dinner before you had a stab at it. My dear. We even had two giants. Scottish deerhounds, every bit as lordly and unkempt and flowing in motion as we’d been led to believe. They were gods, just as the greys were angels. Then we had to face a truth Poe pointed out in his piquant way close to 170 years ago: “But he grew old, this knight so bold, and o’er his heart a shadow fell, as he found no spot of ground that looked like El Dorado.” We’ve graduated from El Dorado. We grew old. So we rescued Scotties. And then a cairn. Always moving smaller. Then the two mutts. We weren’t being snobs. We...