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Sport: Good Grief, Great Gretzky

No. 99 gets No. 77 and No. 78 and No. 79 and.

He would be the Great Something if not Gretzky. So even the soaring alliterative quality of his name is inspired, like his number, 99, an amalgam of Bobby Hull's 9 and Gordie Howe's 9 or perhaps Howe's and Maurice Richard's 9. If Wayne Gretzky is not twice the hockey player anyone has ever seen, how is he doubling all the numbers in his sport?

Good question, eh? Not even rapturous Canadians have a quick answer to what is so great about Gretzky. Including those...

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RAY KELLY, New York City Police Commissioner, on the arrest of a New Jersey man in one of the nation's most baffling missing-children cases, the disappearance more than three decades ago of 6-year-old Etan Patz.
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