On Saturday I broadcast a baseball game. On Sunday I went for a run. The streets were blessedly, but eerily quiet. There were no honking horns, no people shouting at one another, and no sirens, the usual background in this city of New York.

At every firehouse and police station, there were flowers and candles on the sidewalks outside. There were notes from children taped to walls, offering thanks for the rescue efforts and sharing in the pain for those lost.

At Engine Company 8, Ladder Company 2 in midtown, two young women interrupted their stroll to re-light the candles blown out the gentle fall breezes on this beautiful early autumn day. The pictures of those lost from this unit were framed on the outside wall with his message beneath: “We’re leaving the light on for you.”

Passersby stopped at the open firehouse door to talk with the men and women working there. These were quiet conversations between strangers brought together by grief.

At 138 Duane Street, only blocks from where the World Trade Center towers had stood, two kids had a lemonade stand going. “All proceeds go to the rescue effort,” read the penciled sign attached to the front of the makeshift cardboard table.

Across the street, the Zinc Restaurant was open. “We continue to serve the community,” said the sign in the window with the red, white and blue menus. “No charge for NYPD, NYFD and rescue workers.”

A couple of blocks away at Ladder Company 8, the Big Apple Chorus stood at the open fire station door singing God Bless America to the firemen who stood inside, in front of their trucks. When they concluded, the singers and the firemen walked toward one another and hugged.

At the intersection of West Broadway and Leonard, there came that smell. It was arid and heavy, soul-stopping and ghastly.

At the corner of Greenwich and Duane Streets, one looked south and saw hell.

Seventeen stories of rubble and horror, just blocks away, smoldering in contempt with nothing behind it but the empty space of what was. Shouldn’t there at least be an outline in the sky, a scar in the heavens to mark what had stood there?

There was nothing but the drifting smoke.

People stood and stared. Some cried. Many hugged and held hands. Some prayed.

A man walked over to a police officer working there, held out his hand, shook the officer’s hand and said, “Thank you.” He then turned and walked away, crying.

I walked back uptown, out of the ghost town that is lower Manhattan. People were walking their dogs, sitting in coffee shops or buying their groceries.

On Tuesday, I went back to work broadcasting baseball games. It is part of what I do. No, it’s not the same. It never will be.

It wasn’t’ the same when JFK, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were killed. It wasn’t the same when the body bags were coming back from Vietnam. It wasn’t the same when my godchild got sent to fly a fighter jet in the Gulf War.

It wasn’t the same for a lot of people in the past for a lot of different reasons. We go on.

We must go on. If we don’t, evil wins and that is totally unacceptable.

Old Town native Gary Thorne is an ESPN and NBC sportscaster.