February 20, 1994

ALL day long, American sportswriters kept coming up to each other and saying, "Wasn't that lovely?" or "I had tears in my eyes" or "I've never seen anything nicer in all the years I've been working." We are not a sentimental bunch these days. The ancient practice of slobbering over sports champions ("godding them up," as Red Smith described it) is long past. Nowadays we chase figure-skating companions of confessed knee-whackers into courts of law. We follow them through airports. We camp outside their residences. We would sift through their garbage if we could find it. But on Friday we shifted back into a kinder, gentler Grantland Rice gear to shed an unexpected tear for Dan Jansen.

WHEN detectives from the Queens District Attorney's office burst through the doors of Korman Sportswear in late December, they expected to arrest a handful of illegal immigrants for gluing fake designer labels onto a few bins of designer clothing a day. Instead, they found what they called an increasingly potent threat to the fashion industry: a counterfeiter's factory with an elaborate network of computerized machinery that quickly turned run-of-the-mill shirts, jeans and sweatshirts into tens of thousands of brand-name fakes.

WHEN officials in Washington talk about welfare reform, they talk about workfare. The word, a catchall for making welfare recipients do something in exchange for their assistance checks, is central to PResident Clinton's promise to "end welfare as we know it." But it is a word that has as many definitions as there are experimental workfare programs across the United States.

Almost everyone retains some defining image of the day. It might be the pregnant woman plucked off the roof by a wavering helicopter. Or the Secret Service agent blown out of her shoes. Or the people scribbling their wills on tatters of paper in smoky stairwells. Or the kindergarten class trapped for five hours in the inky darkness of a broken elevator, singing silly songs to keep the evil away. On Saturday, at 18 minutes past noon, a year will have passed since lower Manhattan trembled from the bomb that exploded in the entrails of the World Trade Center, opening a jagged cavern five stories deep. Terrorism had landed on American soil as never before. The bomb left six dead, a thousand injured and millions shaken to the marrow.

A viral infection severely damaged the heart of Reggie Lewis, the Boston Celtics' captain, leaving him vulnerable to the abnormal heart rhythm that killed him on July 27, according to his death certificate. Dr. Stanton C. Kessler, the associate chief medical examiner of Massachusetts who signed the death certificate, said in interviews on Friday that a virus was found in Lewis's heart and that it caused myocarditis, an inflammation that scars and enlarges the heart. Kessler said that Lewis's myocarditis had healed but that his heart remained scarred and enlarged when he collapsed and died while shooting baskets at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.