Toss the man some roses. Have the band in the pit shower him with music. At the midnight hour, Rudy Giuliani left the stage of the big hall, and for once the cliche is true: We shall not see his like again.

Across these past eight years, we have grown used to his imperfections: the snarling tone at press conferences, his need to crush all who differed with him, his weakness for the sleazy flatteries of those who licked his boots. He became a one-man Taliban in his war against the Brooklyn Museum. His committee on public decency was an international embarrassment.

Above all, there was his incomprehensible clumsiness over matters of race. He behaved correctly when confronted with the physical and moral outrage that befell Abner Louima in the back of a Brooklyn police station. But the Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond affairs were made even worse by Giuliani's bitter reactions, based as they were on the automatic assumption of police innocence or the victims' guilt.

Those moments played into a wider context: his refusal to reach out to the black and Latino communities, his contempt for Al Sharpton, his simmering fury with David Dinkins long after Dinkins had departed. He often seemed to have a tin ear for what the streets were saying. An opera fan refusing to listen to the blues. Puccini confronted by Coltrane.

But for all of those grievous flaws, and the bruises they left on too many human beings, Rudy Giuliani has been the greatest mayor in the history of this city.

On Sept. 10, he stood as the best mayor since Fiorello LaGuardia. On Sept. 11, and in the days of ash and dread that followed, he eclipsed even the Little Flower. During the gray soul-killing years of the Depression, Fiorello rallied the city with language and laughter and passionate energy. But LaGuardia never faced any calamity that resembled that Tuesday morning in September.

More Than We Can Bear

On that awesome day, Giuliani did his job. And he must have known from the first reports that he was on his own. Through his most trying years, LaGuardia, a Republican, was backed by his friend, Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat. Giuliani had only poor George W. Bush. And that day, while Bush flew around the country in search of a safe harbor, Giuliani visited the burning stumps of the World Trade Center four times. He was almost killed. He was covered by ash and dust. But hour after hour, he issued orders, organized the rescue effort, showed the country and the world that New York could take any punch and get up off the floor. He did not need Bush to tell him what to do.

More important, in every public utterance, he found exactly the right tone. He gave the city, and the country, the facts as he knew them, even when they were most terrible. He knew from what he had witnessed that New Yorkers did not panic that day. They were stunned. They were awed — for what had happened was unimaginable. And many were afraid, because that morning, nobody knew what else might be coming. But they did not panic.

And so there was absolutely no panic in Giuliani's tone. He didn't bellow. He didn't resort to loudmouthed saloon anger. He took the best he had absorbed from the people of New York — their toughness, resilience and heart — and expressed himself in their own language. And spoke the finest sentence of his administration:

"The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear."

That sentence changed everything. Saying it, Giuliani made certain that sorrow would be part of our anger. There would be time for fury at the religious fanatics who had turned airplanes into missiles. There would be time for Bush to organize the absolutely necessary retaliation against the right-wing Islamic crackpots who sent them at New York and the Pentagon. There would be time for showing, in public or private, a love for the country.

But all of that would have been empty and cheap without Giuliani's simple sentence. The deaths of all those people, from so many countries, of all races and religions, poor busboys and people of immense wealth, police officers and firefighters, secretaries carrying coffee and aDanish to their desks: Theywere more than any of us could bear.

Carried Huge Burden

Late that morning, knowing my wife was safe, standing in a shower while clear water washed away the ash that covered me when the south tower collapsed, I tried to imagine myself into Giuliani's mind at that very moment. I failed. I could not imagine what he was thinking, and how he was doing what he was doing. I knew that I could not do it myself.

Through that long day, and into the black night of our neighborhood — where the lights and power were gone — I saw men and women doing their jobs, covered with ash, while flames licked at the black, empty sky where the towers had fallen. Giuliani was nowhere in sight, but his presence was everywhere. In one day, his story hadshifted from mere political biography into the shape of great fiction.

At the end of the second act, the protagonist was beset by absurdities and afflictions: cancer, a ruined marriage, the exposure of ancient family secrets. People who applauded him in the first act — for cutting crime by two-thirds, for lifting the sense of menace from the streets, for helping reduce welfare by an astonishing 700,000 cases — were now tired of him. Tired of his rages. Tired of his petty vendettas. The polls showed that they wanted him to go away.

But then came the third act. The entire city, along with the country and the world, at last saw the Giuliani that his friends always called Rudy: kind, oddly modest, fundamentally decent. Many politicians are nasty in private and create lovable masks for the public. Giuliani did the opposite. After Sept. 11, public and private faces merged.

To be sure, sainthood will forever elude him, as it eludes the rest of us. He had to be saved by Freddy Ferrer from the folly of the 90-day extension of his term. He can still lash out at what he believes are dumb questions. He has tried to slip the ballpark deals past the city in his final hours. His coming book might be still another tiresome exercise in settling scores.

But at the midnight hour of this last day of a dreadful year, when Giuliani left the big hall, he departed in the company of his better angels. Lift a glass and toast that Giuliani, and forgive him all his sins. Rush him with flowers. Strike up the band in a tune of farewell. For yes: We shall not see his like again.