It’s the same in every town in America. In Pittsburgh, they stand at the end of the bar and recall Franco’s Immaculate Reception. In St. Louis, the old guys crouch on their arthritic knees and show you how Stand the Man came out of his cobra crouch to lace into a fastball. In New York, inside people’s heads, it’s as though Clyde and Willis and Dollar Bill are still turning a fast break into a blur.

Around here, though, we have it better than almost any place in America. We have a place to visit our memories, which are the repository of our otherwise-vanished youth. Sports Legends at Camden Yards isn’t just the finest local sports museum in America — it’s comparable to Cooperstown, where they keep major league baseball’s memories, or Canton, Ohio, where they keep professional football’s.

But Sports Legends struggles to find an audience and adequate financing. Last week, the museum got a much-needed infusion of cash from City Hall, $125,000, which will give it a few months of breathing room. Two days ago museum director Mike Gibbons went to Annapolis to ask a couple of legislative committees for about $600,000 in state assistance.

“They’ve got to make a decision,” said Gibbons, as he drove home from Saturday’s hearings. “Are sports important in our culture? We think they are. We think they’re about the pursuit of excellence.”

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Everybody wants the museum to succeed, and everybody knows why it’s having temporary problems, but nobody’s guaranteeing any serious money to sustain the place through some unanticipated growing pains.

When they opened the doors a couple of years ago, officials estimated 2 percent of Orioles’ crowds would stop in. That figure has held up. The problem is, it’s 2 percent of a far lower body count, as Orioles’ attendance has dropped by nearly half over the last several summers. Add to that the huge amount of convention-headquarters hotel construction currently going on in the museum’s very shadow, and there are deterrents for many who might otherwise venture into the area.

But excuses aren’t going to mean much if this museum, the outgrowth of the Babe Ruth Birthplace a few blocks away on Emory Street, is forced to close its doors. If this one gets away, then shame on all of us. We’d be waving goodbye to our own youth, and the gladdest hours of our sense of extended community.

The museum is a treasure. You’re part of the Geritol set? There’s Unitas throwing to Berry in the frozen twilight at Yankee Stadium in ‘58, there’s Blair waiting for that final fly ball to land in his glove in ‘66, there are Bellino and Staubach when they made Navy a national power. You’re a little younger? There’s Ray Lewis leading the Ravens to a Super Bowl win, there’s the indomitable Juan Dixon leading Maryland to a national title, and there are the Terrapin women marching to their own championship.

Here’s one man’s opinion on a missing link between Sports Legends and its potential audience: Every high school coach in the area ought to bring his or her team here at the start of each season.

“Look around,” they should tell their kids. They should point to Brooksie diving to his left, or Spats running away from everybody, or Earl Banks when his Morgan State gang went undefeated year after year.

“You are descended from this,” the coaches should tell their kids. “This is your legacy. Their greatness is now passed on to you, if you’ll reach for it. You see Cal Ripken over there? He grew up just like you. You see Michael Phelps? He came up the same as you.”

If that’s not a pep talk waiting to be delivered, then what is?

But the museum’s more than that. In the continuing resurgence of Baltimore, it’s a reminder to us all of the ongoing importance of sports in the life of Maryland, of the personalities and the teams that have bound us as an otherwise disparate collection of communities. And it’s a place, like no other city has, to visit our memories.