Records are sports' magic carpet. Mere mentions of the milestones of our games whisk us to a different time, transported by blasts of nostalgia. Assaults on the standards link generations, as old-timers again see the past through the eyes of the record-setters and the young gain a new appreciation for them.

We've seen this phenomenon time and again in baseball. Pete Rose's odyssey to the hit record made Ty Cobb once again current. By driving past his record for most homers in a season, Mark McGwire brought new honor to Roger Maris.

Barry Bonds is our reigning H.G. Wells, herding fans into his time machine for trips back to the mid-'70s of Hank Aaron with his methodical pursuit of 755.

We are indeed all sitting shotgun on Bonds' magic carpet ride, arguably the most epic anyone could take. Baseball's career home run record is often portrayed as the most momentous, luminescent and hallowed of sports numbers.

In this corner of the world, that assertion may be beyond argument. But there is more to the sports world than the League of Baseball Nations, more fields beyond the warning tracks and foul lines of the diamond.

There are other numbers which conjure comparable emotions and memories. Their devotees may consider them unbreakable -- after all, having ventured out of modern man's reach is a very compelling quality -- but that isn't what makes them magical.

Rather, it's the circumstances under which they were achieved and the intensity with which they stirred peoples' emotions, then and ever since.

They are all flash-points for flashbacks.

A Top 10, in no particular order other than the numerical countup:

7: Mark Spitz

Gold medals in a single Olympiad. In retrospect, it was more like a fable -- with a dark side -- than reality. Not only the record medal haul, but by someone as celebrated for being Jewish as for being a champion swimmer -- and in the 1972 Munich Olympics, forever stained by the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists. Never have the highs and lows of the human gamut so intersected.

11: Byron Nelson

Consecutive PGA Tour victories. Yes, Tiger Woods is hot. And, certainly, golf is far more competitive now than it was in 1945. So Woods' best streak of seven straight tour wins is admirable, but the absolute in this class remains Nelson, whose five-month invincibility will continue to be revived every time Tiger makes a run at it.

13: Just Fontaine

Goals in a single World Cup Final. This is a revered number in France, for its striker's explosion in six games during the 1958 finals in Sweden. The No. 2 scorer, Pele of champion Brazil, had less than half of Fontaine's total, with six.

47: Oklahoma Sooners and Johnny Unitas

Consecutive college football victories. In the era of 10-game seasons, Oklahoma went undefeated and untied from Oct. 10, 1953 through Nov. 16, 1957. The streak, incredibly, included 23 shutouts and overall the Sooners -- get this -- outscored opponents 1,620-269. But none of the numbers stick out as much as 47, which remained associated with coach Bud Wilkinson for 37 years, until his death in 1994.

Consecutive games throwing a touchdown pass. The game has evolved into an aerial circus, has hosted an arsenal of strong-armed pocket and scrambling rocket launchers, but no one -- not Montana, not Marino, not Manning -- has matched the iconic Johnny U.'s string of pearls from 1956 through 1960.

49: Rocky Marciano

Consecutive wins by undefeated heavyweight. From Lee Epperson in 1947 through Archie Moore in 1955, Rocco Francis Marchegiano took on, and took out, all comers, 43 of them by knockout. The number evokes a golden age for the sport, particularly as remembered from the morass of today's heavyweight division.

88: John Wooden

Consecutive college basketball victories. It is really UCLA's number, too, but it will always be associated with the one and only Wizard. With another Westwood wonder, Bill Walton, at the controls, the Bruins posted one "W" after another between losses to Notre Dame on Jan. 23, 1971 and Jan. 19, 1974. Couched within that streak were three installments of another -- the seven straight NCAA Championships.

100: Wilt Chamberlain

Points in one NBA game. There was absolutely no premeditation. Chamberlain, in fact, showed up for the late-season game in Hershey, Pa., against the Knicks sleepless and hung over from a night of partying in New York. But one thing led to another and led to triple digits and a night that keeps growing in legend. Chamberlain broke his own scoring record -- but when he had broken Elgin Baylor's previous mark of 71 by putting up 78 three months earlier, that required three overtimes against the Lakers.

215: Wayne Gretzky

Points in one NHL season. The Great One spent 22 years putting up some great numbers. All are unbreakable testaments to his career, but none glow like his 1985-86 output. He averaged 2.7 points per game while not missing a face-off. This number violates a sport's norm perhaps more than any other. What do we mean? The NHL's most recent scoring leader (Sidney Crosby) had 120 points.

698.5: Bob Beamon

Long jump, in inches. A unique entry in this list, the only one that has since been broken. But that hasn't diminished the shock of Beamon's leap of 29-2.5 at the 1968 Olympics in the high altitude of Mexico City, where he soared past the existing world record by 21.75 inches -- becoming the first man to reach 28 and 29 feet. The record stood for 23 years, until Mike Powell went 29 ft. 4-3/8 inches in 1991.

868: Sadaharu Oh

Home runs in professional baseball. Bending our ground rules a little, because it is baseball -- but a hemisphere away. When Oh also blew by Babe Ruth, virtually in Aaron's footsteps, and kept on going until ending his 22-season career in 1980, few outside of Japan paid attention. But the recent assimilation of Japanese players into the Majors will bring heightened credibility to a number that is already the monolith for Japanese fans.