It's an odd feeling to be falling in love with New York. Because you know that, oh say, a hundred million suitors have come before you, you feel partly like an interloper and partly just plain silly, like someone only now discovering that a fellow named Jordan could play a little hoop. But the knowledge that you are not the first doesn't dilute the intensity of the experience. You still feel all the wonder of discovery, the sheer delight in every little thing, that makes a new love so exhilarating and so sappy.

So it is with this odd feeling running through his mind that a visitor from San Francisco finds himself standing in the Times Square subway station one snowy Thursday. It's 5:00 p.m. and a thick crowd has collected on the platform, quietly restless with the rush-hour urgency to get home. Before long a train arrives, and the crowd begins edging aboard. Then suddenly a commotion develops just inside the open middle door of one car. A scrawny kid, maybe seventeen or eighteen years old, has tried to lift the wallet from a woman's purse as she stepped from the platform to the train, but he's been caught in the act by a nearby man, a stocky fellow, who's got hold of the kid by his arm and coat collar. The intended victim quickly wins a tug-of-war for her wallet against little resistance from the kid, who seems eager to get this disappointing turn of events behind him.

With the wallet safely recovered the stocky man heaves the kid out the door of the train with a loud, "Get out of here." Except, of course, he says, "Get outa heeya," and the accent makes all the difference.

Behind him, the woman recovers from her momentary confusion and becomes suddenly angry. Short and a bit stocky herself, she's well into middle age but no matter. Exclaiming, "That bastad!" - her "bastad" has no "r" - she starts back out the train after the kid, clearly intent on mayhem, but the man holds her back.

"Naw. Naw," he says. "Ya gotcher wallet. Whaddaya want?" The man, this good samaritan, is clearly visible now. Bluff, brawny, silver-haired, glowing with cheerful "I seen a lot in my time" vitality, he looks to be about forty-five, and if he's not a trucking company dispatcher or a construction foreman there's no art to this world.

"Ya gotcher wallet," he repeats, and you get the sense that he's slightly disappointed at the woman's lapse in composure. Is she not a New Yorker, after all? A certain standard is expected. You get your wallet back, you throw the thief off the train, you go about your business. Whaddaya want?

But the woman turns around to find that all eyes are on her and she can't help herself. As the train pulls out and gains speed she excitedly recounts what little she really knows: "He had my wallet!" It turns out there's a third player in this drama, another woman, who observed the kid crowding too close to his future victim and sounded the alarm. She, too, has a story to tell: "I could see he was gettin' too close. It wasn't natural, ya know?" These facts are repeated once or twice, accompanied by sympathetic murmuring from the crowd, and then the stocky hero apparently decides this show has had its run.

"Awright, awright," he tells the women, "take yer bows." Though he has stopped a felony in progress, he could not have shown less concern for what just happened unless he'd sat right down and cracked open the sports section of a newspaper.

Later, you'll tell the story many times. You know it's not a big story, really, maybe not even out of the ordinary, and that dangerous subways are a cliché about the old New York. And maybe silver-haired crime-stoppers who say "Awright, take yer bow" are a dime a dozen in this town, and maybe middle-aged women who want to get "that bastad" are just as common, and, yeah, it's only an accent if you aren't from around here, but none of that matters right now, in the tingly bubble of your infatuation.

Right now it's all just oddly, mysteriously exciting. You look up as the train slows and stops and you catch another glimpse of the good samaritan. You can't imagine an organism more perfectly adapted to its environment. He looks over his shoulder and sees another train stopped across the platform. He slides quickly out of your car, across the platform to the other train. Maybe it's the express, or maybe it heads off to Brooklyn or Queens, or to the somewhere else where guys like him come from. He strides into the crowded car, disappearing behind the closing doors, and the train pulls out.

Eamon Hickey has bylines in various print and web publications, including Wired, Fortune, Ziff-Davis Smart Business, Computer Shopper, CNET. He now lives in Brooklyn.