This is The Jersey Numbers Blog, which has nothing to do with phone numbers in New Jersey. Rather, we yap about and follow a whole bunch of stuff having to do with those digits athletes don on their shirts.

We recognize that, to the jocks themselves, the numbers they wear while playing their respective games are as much a part of who they are as their genetic makeup, their athletic abilities, or their prowess in producing illegitimate children.

We like single-digit numbers and good-looking numbers, but we hate ugly numbers, like No. 38. Most of the time, we also like when athletes intentionally wear numbers that seem completely out of place.

We believe in retired numbers — for the most part. We definitely think the Boston Celtics, New York Yankees, and Chicago Bears have retired too many; however, that argument is for another day.

We feel bad for athletes who, when they go to a new team, aren’t able to wear their preferred number — whether because someone else on the team is wearing it, because it’s retired, or because some crappy player who used to play on the team happened to die or suffer some traumatic career-ending injury and now it’s “unofficially retired.”

For the record, we don’t think Robert DeNiro’s character, Gil, in “The Fan” should have killed Primo because he wouldn’t give up No. 11 to Wesley Snipes’ character, Bobby Rayburn. We would’ve rather seen Rayburn, despite having just been signed the previous offseason to a $40-million deal (which was large for 1996), throw a hissy fit and demand to be traded over it.

But we digress.

Oh, and, yes: when we refer to specific numbers immediately preceding the digit itself, we will use “No.” instead of “#”. We were trained in AP Style and that’s one of the few things we’ve retained.