One of my orchestra conductors used to say that no sound ever truly dies. A former classmate recently reminded me of this philosophy, which we were awed by and came to ardently believe as eighth- graders: that all the vibrations in the history of the universe travel endlessly throughout space and time, never fading, just moving from one place to another.

Maybe this is why it came as no surprise to me when, standing next to Mr. Burkhart in the lobby last Saturday as we waited for the last Christmas at Home performance to start, he began to wax poetic about the acoustics of the Paramount Theatre, and the impossibility of replicating atmosphere.

It comes down not just to the shape of the space, he said, but also the quality of the air during construction, the paint used on the walls, the morale of the crew, on and on. He, like many others have, told me that night that he loves the Paramount.

We throw that word around a lot, “love.” But there is something in the way I’ve heard it used when talking about our theatre that gives the single syllable the weight of sincerity, and a sort of tangible resonance bound up with the Paramount’s particular history of sound.

Later that evening, as I stood in the back and listened to both ensemble and audience — nearly 300 people in all — sing the final chorus of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” I added to that list of things that make our theatre sound just so: the ghosts of those who have heard and seen something worth remembering here.

If you take one second to be optimistic (difficult, but do try), then you can believe that from 1929 to now, nearly every person who has come to us has deeply loved someone or something (loved this person or thing more even than themselves, thank God) while sitting in C12, or EE3, or N8. And if you’re one to believe in this “soul patina,” as my friend once put it, then you can be sure that when you really listen while sitting in C12 or EE3 or N8, you can hear the cumulative force of these various and safely harbored loves.

Added up over the course of 86 years, it’s no wonder the music sounds as good as it does. It’s no wonder we love the Paramount Theatre.