Ever play the game "Best This, Best That"? Best month: October. Best movie: Hoosiers or To Kill a Mockingbird. Best TV series: the beloved "Andy Griffith Show." Best music: Whatever year spun your favorite songs.

By and large, we love the music that played when we were young. Growing up in the 1940s, you might choose the year of "White Christmas" or "Cliffs over Dover." A tad younger? "Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania" or "Old Cape Cod."

What buoys "Best This, Best That" is that there's no wrong answer. Some, of course, are more right than others. Drum roll. The envelope, please. In music, my best year was 1972.

I was a student in college. Datelines linked Kent State and Attica. America was at war with itself: Right against left, hawk against dove, Main Street v. counterculture, hard hat v. hippie. It was a time one might not want to relive - but would not have missed living for the world.

Recite the names: Spiro Agnew and Martha Mitchell, Abby Hoffman and Daniel Ellsberg, the Brothers Berrigan and Richard Nixon. Recall the events - campus tumult, the women's movement, above all, the war. John Connally was right when he once told me, Texas-style, "Everything about the early '70s was big."

In the age's cultural collision, the university campus was its spiritual heart - and there we would turn on a, yes, record player and marvel at its literate, often brooding, and frequently quite wonderful songs.

Carole King's album "Tapestry" lifted 1972. So did songs by Carly Simon and Chicago and Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Of the 1970s' 21 most popular songs, says Billboard Magazine, five were born in '72. The airwaves echoed to what TIME called "a diverse, wonderfully evocative collection of rock-composer-performers and individual balladeers."

Remember Harry Chapin's "Taxi", all 400 seconds long, which linked themes from broken dreams to masochism? "Taxi" was born in 1972. Too, the scorching "Layla" - America's best-ever convertible song. Remember "Stairway to Heaven"? To this day it remains the most widely requested song of all time. Finally, "American Pie," a farewell song to youth, its lyrics mythic and impalpable. "Long, long, time ago. I can still remember." Be honest, friends, can't you?

The songs of 1972 mirrored the age's beauty and belligerence. Even now, its music speaks of sadness, empathy, and evenings in the rain. Listening, you are catapulted by its exaggerated energy - back to Cambodia and the Silent Majority; to Peace with Honor, and The Greening of America; back to "Diary" and "Without You" and, yes, the immortal "Maggie May." In "American Pie," the music died - but not to us. Today, our music lives.

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