The timing of this story is both perfect and terrible. It is perfect in that today is the 45^thanniversary of both the day and date of the event it self.

It is terrible in that it would be a better story on the soon-to-appear, all-purpose website, Pundificator.com, rather than the historically mostly political libertyPell. Watch for a back-to-school launch.

A compromise is required because the next time July 12 happens on a Friday will be five years from now, the 50^thanniversary of what you are about to read. Maybe I will run the story again? You will have forgotten and I might get away with it.

The standards for romantic skills have been ramped up significantly in recent decades. If you bother to look at the Sunday section of The New York Times devoted to marriages and engagements, which those who once appeared in those pages emphatically no longer do, you will see the oeuvre of romance publicists whose careers are devoted to chronicles of competitive wooing.

That section of The New York Times has long been pejoratively referred to as the “ladies’ sports page.” Well, I guess I have played my politically incorrect card for this story.

For upwardly mobile millennials, the choreography of the proposal is an art form. Hence, it is easy for the older baby boomer generation to feel like a bunch of slackers in comparison. Could it be time for the oldies, who lacked publicists and videographers to chronicle romantic events, to strike back against obsessed millennials, who think they invented romance?

Forty-five years ago today was my wife’s and my rehearsal dinner. It happened on the Friday night before before our 4:00 p.m. Saturday wedding followed by a reception under a striped tent (from which we were expelled at 7:00 p.m. so the guests could get it over with and go home).

The one bit of background you need is that Simmy, the bride in this saga, was (and still is) a really good tennis player. In contrast, I was (and still am) not in that category. Keep that in mind especially when you click on the link below.

The custom then (now repeated to excess) was to toast each other. Simmy wrote a poem invoking the memory of watching me play hockey at Harvard. Here’s a stanza, there are more.

Clad in his armor of crimson and sweating,

Slapping the puck right into the netting,

The love of my life, I remember just how,

His helmet perched on his strong handsome brow.

Inept at the writing poetry, I found a John Betjeman classic – Miss Joan Hunter Dunn– and read it to her. (Click the damn link it is the whole point.)

Today, nearly 5 decades later, I still get sniffly at both of them.

Take that millennial romance show offs. We weren’t completely useless boyfriends and girlfriends.

We had skillz and we didn’t need publicists.