Islanders love their ferries. They loved the stately old Naushon, a converted coastal steamer and the last of a line of truly elegant ferries to ply the Vineyard route, with her staterooms, leather banquettes and rounded bow that carved a smooth path through the rough chop of the Sound.

If you were out and about on the Island before the Super Bowl on Sunday, you saw ample evidence that you don’t need a ferry reservation to be a Patriots fan. A father and child dressed in matching Patriots jerseys wandered the aisles of the grocery store. A woman buying her latte sported a windbreaker with the team logo splashed across the back.

The swirl of news in Edgartown and Oak Bluffs this week around the two town wastewater treatment plants, both managed by superintendent Joseph Alosso, is a tale of two towns with strikingly different approaches to handling a problem.

Ponce de Leon had it wrong. The fountain of youth was never bubbling away in some mangrove swamp in Florida. Rather, it rests on a hillside in winter, during the first snowfall of the year, the Tashmoo Overlook to be specific, where on Saturday all manner of children, big and small, towheaded and gray-haired, took to their sleds.

The hill is not huge, but the view is. While the snow fell, depth perception blurred until it seemed possible to launch off the hill and land somewhere halfway to the Cape.

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In the 1990 sci-fi movie Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger and other residents of a futuristic Earth take their vacations virtually — by having computerized pleasure-trip experiences inserted in their brains while their bodies veg out at home. This method was presumably cheaper — and safer — than physically going on holiday.

As the Governator discovers, computer-assisted travel can be more dangerous than the real thing (not to mention the cost of even a virtual flight to Mars).

He was a man of few words, but when he was honored with a surprise party in 1991 after half a century in the Oak Bluffs fire department, more than thirty of them as fire chief, Nelson Amaral told the gathering of some two hundred well-wishers at Anthony’s Restaurant: “You sure know how to get a guy. I’m at a loss for words. It has been fifty great years. I have loved every minute of it. I just wish I had fifty more to give.”