Belichick was 70 when he coached last season. He is 71 now, still calling the shots in Foxborough, suddenly hearing that he is too old and that the game has passed him by.

Now it’s my turn. You are reading the words of a 70-year-old columnist.

There’s no getting around 70. We can kid ourselves about 40 being the new 30, and 50 being the new 40. Blah, blah. There is no hiding 70. It’s bloody old.

None of us start out old. Earl Weaver called me “young Dan” when I was on the road covering the Orioles at the age of 23.

When I first wrote for the Globe, baseball scribe Clif Keane said, “Here comes the baby-faced assassin.”

Beleaguered Celtics coach Bill Fitch pulled me aside in a hotel in Milwaukee in 1983 and said, “You’ve got a face like an altar boy, but you’re really an executioner.”

Now I am the wrinkled curmudgeon. Angry tweeters and e-mailers (believe it or not, there are folks who take this stuff very seriously) pepper me with “Old Man Yells at Cloud” memes, and one of my devoted readers comments, “Please retire,” after each and every column. Got to admire that consistency.

The great Leigh Montville once wrote a column about how much he loved Tommy John because John was the last active ballplayer still older than he was. I crossed that barrier a long time ago. Now I’m older than almost every coach and manager, even older than a lot of the team owners.

Emerson College basketball coach Bill Curley is 51. I remember when he was 2, sitting on his mom’s lap while his uncle Joe played for the Hemenway AC against the Roberts Club at Walsh Park in Dorchester in August 1974. That was before Curley’s four seasons at Boston College, before his long-ago seven-year NBA career.

In 1977, I wrote a story for the Baltimore Evening Sun about a high school soccer star from Aberdeen, Md., named Cal Ripken Jr. I’m not quite sure what became of that fine young man, but I bet things turned out well for him.

Aaron Boone has been manager of the Yankees for six seasons. I covered his dad (Bob Boone) in the 1980 World Series, and interviewed his grandfather (Ray Boone), who scouted young, skinny Curt Schilling at Yavapai Junior College in the 1980s.

Players are always young. Fresh new faces replace the ones from last year.

Those of us reporting … grow older and older. Brothers Ryan, Powers, Grossfeld, Hohler, and Dupont continue to entertain and inform Globe readers. The great Gammons still brings the heat anytime he sits at a keyboard.

And get this: The Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s Sid Hartman kept writing his column after turning 100 and was still cranking ‘em out when he died in 2020.

Older and wiser than he was in 2009, Belichick walked back his words about Levy when we spoke last summer.

“I wish I hadn’t said that,” the coach confided. “That was not one of my better statements.”

Will Bill coach into his 80s? I wondered.

“I’ve learned my lesson on that one,” he said with a laugh. “One year at a time.”

Sounds like a plan.

I promise to stop after turning 100, but as long as I’m younger than everybody running for president, I think I’ll keep going, if you don’t mind.

▪ Quiz: Name the seven men to win a World Series as both a player and manager since the start of division play in 1969 (answer below).

▪ I was not shattered when the US women’s soccer team was unceremoniously booted out of World Cup competition in Melbourne last Sunday. This has nothing to do with politics or activism — we admired the likes of Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, and other American champs of yore for those things — but USWNT 2023 was an unlikable squad on a par with Mike Lansing, Carl Everett, and the 2001 Red Sox.

Clearly no longer dominant (who can forget the cartwheels during their 13-0 rout of Thailand in 2019?), they still bragged too much and demonstrated little respect for opponents. They celebrated when they should have been chagrined (even former teammate Carli Lloyd called them out for dancing and laughing after their uninspiring 0-0 performance vs. Portugal), and ultimately they turned in the worst US performance in Women’s World Cup history (zero goals in their final 238 minutes of play).

In the end, we saw glory hog Megan Rapinoe airmailing a penalty kick, then laughing about it on the way back to her teammates. The odd reaction was widely forgiven (”Just a sick joke … I’m going to miss a penalty?” explained Rapinoe), and we were assured that it won’t taint her legacy. One columnist anointed Rapinoe the “defining athlete of her generation.”

In the end, New York Times soccer savant Rory Smith served as a voice of reason, noting, “When they are no longer almost a guarantee of winning … they cannot be protected for what they represent, for what they mean, rather than what they do. There comes a point when they have to be judged as athletes, not activists, and that means knowing when to say goodbye.”

Goodbye, USWNT.

▪ The leaguewide corruption of baseball’s official scoring (everything is now a hit, and errors are almost never assigned) got the attention of The Athletic, which produced a fairly thorough analysis of the sad situation.

This passage jumped out at me: “When a reporter for The Athletic contacted several scorers, MLB director of official scoring, Tyler Barton, e-mailed the reporter to explain that employees were ‘prohibited from speaking with any media’ without approval from the league.”

Scorers are considered MLB employees. And MLB doesn’t want them talking.

MLB’s partnership with legalized gambling undoubtedly has something to do with the cone of silence.

I’m just amazed that more pitchers aren’t complaining. Their ERAs are unfairly affected when everything’s a hit.

▪ When Oscar-winning director William Friedkin died Monday in Los Angeles, I immediately thought of Bob Cousy (who turned 95 Wednesday) and “Blue Chips.” Friedkin was best known for “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist,” but hoop junkies remember when the famous director recruited an all-star cast for his film about a basketball coach played by Nick Nolte.

Shaquille O’Neal played a feature role, and Friedkin also secured the services of Penny Hardaway, Bobby Knight, Larry Bird, Dick Vitale, and Bobby Hurley. Cooz played Nolte’s athletic director.

According to the Washington Post’s obit, Friedkin “rarely cracked a book in school and mostly excelled at basketball and shoplifting.”

▪ Heathcliff Slocumb invited Dan Duquette to a charity golf tournament in the Dominican Republic in October, and Duquette hopes to attend. The Duke famously acquired Jason Varitek and Derek Lowe for the Red Sox when he traded Slocumb to the Mariners at the deadline in the summer of 1997.

▪ Jonathan Papelbon must have ignored NESN’s in-house happy talk memo. The Big Galoot has been refreshingly candid and management-critical in his Red Sox analysis. He certainly couldn’t work for the Orioles, who foolishly suspended capable Kevin Brown for merely stating facts about the team’s history at the Trop Dome. Wonder what the Orioles would do if Brown asked management how they could be so “obtuse”?

▪ Boston University ethics professor Joshua Pederson last week penned a Globe piece titled, “Jaylen Brown and the optics of great generosity.” The author noted that while Brown signed his whopping $304 million contract at the MIT Media Lab, promoting the Bridge Program, sponsored by Brown’s 7uice Foundation, the foundation received $25,000 from Brown in 2020-21 (the last year in which public records are available), which represents one-10th of 1 percent of Brown’s $23 million salary that season. The 7uice Foundation disbursed $6,500 in grants in ’20-21.

Responding to an inquiry from the Globe, the 7uice Foundation gave the following statement:

“The reports are not inclusive of the personal financial support that Jaylen has provided on behalf of the 7uice Foundation, nor are the reports inclusive of the personal financial support Jaylen has provided to other charitable organizations. The 7uice Foundation has also been reclassified from a private foundation to a public charity and the IRS specifically instructs organizations to omit unreimbursed expenses paid by officers from these reports.”

Good for Brown for donating anything, but Pederson and others are waiting to learn if anything changes in the wake of his new deal.

▪ The carpet-bombing assault from the Patriots media cartel promoting Bob Kraft’s Hall of Fame candidacy has been over-the-top, even by Kraft’s lofty standards. Kraft should put Pro Football Hall of Famer Bill Parcells in the Patriots Hall of Fame before he pushes this hard for his own Canton induction.

▪ Big-time college sports is a complete farce. The once-vaunted Pac-12 is down to four schools — Stanford, California, Oregon State, and Washington State. Five others (Oregon, Colorado, Arizona, Arizona State, Utah) left last Friday, and the conference will likely dissolve altogether when its broadcast deal expires in June 2024.

▪ Aaron Boone looked weak trying to explain Giancarlo Stanton trotting toward home and getting tagged out by a mile against the Astros. “It wasn’t a great look, but nothing other than just making sure he doesn’t put himself in a dangerous position,” explained the manager. The Yankees are in danger of playing sub-.500 ball for the first time since 1992.

▪ Here’s hoping good guy Christian Arroyo, now playing in Worcester, gets back to the big leagues. Arroyo is just a few days shy of five years of service time.

▪ Only the Red Sox would go ahead with Kiké Hernández Bobblehead Night two weeks after trading the player.

▪ Quiz answer: Dusty Baker, Alex Cora, Joe Girardi, Davey Johnson, Lou Piniella, Dave Roberts, Mike Scioscia.

Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at daniel.shaughnessy.com. Follow him .