"deeeeeee-TROIT!" as grinning announcers cry, is the vortex and hub of Michigan. Think:

* 3 M's: Motown Music Magic.

* Lions and Tigers and Pistons, oh my. And Red Wings.

* The Motor City.

The might and majesty of the Mitten State, woes and wonders condense and intensify in Detroit, through its sprawling suburbs and spread like sparkler fingers outward.

Roll in for the annual Free Press Marathon and the city spirit grabs you ... in steam escaping from manhole covers, mirror glass, flags snapping atop tall buildings.

The buzz in streets is as palpable and ephemeral as whatever drives runners to trek 26.2 miles from Comerica Park, the Tigers' den, through Mexican Village, south across the Ambassador Bridge to Canada, riverside through Windsor, north for an underwater mile through an echoing tunnel back to America, past Corktown and theater districts to calm Belle Isle, past Indian Village and Greektown to finish in the Lions' den, Ford Field, amid din of jumbo-trons, cheering fans and bleachers climbing geometrically toward a ceiling sealing all, near where all began.

The point of it? You are trying to find that out too.

Your mission: to booth-sit two days in Cobo Hall at the pre-race expo, shoot Internet videos of the race, hang out in Hart Plaza near the Detroit River, under the Renaissance Center soaring, and remember a summer too many years ago.

***

It was July 1967 and Detroit was burning. You were 12, staying with your family on a lake 100 miles away. Your mom, born and raised in Detroit, didn't understand what was happening to her city.

It was hot and haze hung above the lake, mixed with smells of coconut oil and songs from transistor radios: "Light My Fire," "Whiter Shade of Pale," "I Can See for Miles," plus Motown tunes

"I Was Made to Love Her," "Respect," "The Happening" ...

What did you know of Detroit? Near nothing. Your family drove there seldom as possible to visit Mom's mom and stepdad (her birth dad fled; your mom never met him) while you listened, car-dazed, to headphones:

I know you've deceived me, now here's a surprise

I know that you have 'cause there's magic in my eyes

I can see for miles and miles

Dad, a smalltown boy, hated driving to see the in-laws, steering a station wagon, with four kids and carsick spaniel in back, through traffic, spaghetti exits.

You saw Detroit through the windows: the Vernor's gnome, Uniroyal tire, plants and housing projects like huge, grim temples. Whatever cities you might see later - New York, London, Paris ... - Detroit, depressed or distressed, would always be your Big City. By the time the July 24-28 riots ended, 43 people were dead and 467 injured. There were 7,231 arrests and 2,509 stores burned or looted. Dad had the reason he had needed to never drive through Detroit again.

*** "Burn it? Why?" asks your friend, an Olympian runner born after this particular madness happened. "I can't chase the songs from that summer out of my mind," you say. He helps you lift bags because your right elbow's broken. You're at a marathon and can't run because jarring hurts it. "Joe Louis's Fist" - a 24- foot bronze arm suspended from support beams and paying tribute to the boxing champion - hangs as useless as your appendage beside Hart Plaza. Nearby stands the Michigan Labor Legacy Landmark, a 63-foot-high stainless-steel hoop with a gap atop it. It, like the Fist and enough green statues to fully populate most small towns, stands for something greater. Detroit has so many unforgettable heroes you'll never remember all of them. If everyone and everything means more symbolically than literally, good thing there's you to make up the deficit. You mean less.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T Find out what it means to me

Cobo pulses with runners from everywhere: old, young, fast, slow. Weekend-long rain forecast never shows. The cloud over carmakers, pay and pension cuts looms more ominous; the time may come when Detroit summons statues back to life to perform heroics while mortals stand frozen, fear-filled. But not Sunday. It's a record field for America's fastest-growing marathon. Yes, half-marathon leaders get mis-steered near the finish, an allegedly-radioactive runner inspires border guards to waylay groups in the tunnel. Everything that can happen probably will happen in Detroit. What did you expect? What does that mean to the thousands out there? They come, more and more each year, for some reason. Internal combustion, on which Detroit is built, fuels them too: not raging outward in flames and ruin, but the force behind and within that drives. They can run for miles. MR