As the pace of Baby Boomers leaving this dimension — a process that takes them, as newspapers a century ago might put it, “into the shadows” — I predict a sharp upswing in a very annoying post-mortem task.

Getting rid of the dearly departed’s T-shirts.

Boomers, or male Boomers, anyway, have been wearing T-shirts their entire lives, and here I am talking not about just undershirts, but shirts with messages or pictures on them. T-shirts. Meant to be worn in informal settings, or around the house.

And we never throw them out. Somebody might try to “help us” reduce the inventory of T-shirts in the drawer, when we are not looking, but we Never Throw Them Out, and by the time the Grim Reaper gets around to us, the pile of T-shirts will be enormous.

Which takes me to one of my favorite T-shirts: The gray and orange T-shirt from the “2007 Caltech ‘thinker, tinker and stinker’ Classic basketball tournament, above.

It takes me back to another dimesion — working in California as a sports columnist. A Caltech piece was one of the last 5-6 columns I did.

A writer would be tempted to go see Caltech play basketball because they were particularly uncompetitive for, oh, 27 years — a span during which they did not win a single Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC) game. The SCIAC is NCAA Division III and is made up of, mostly, other brainiac schools, though none quite like Caltech — the notional work environment of the four genius guys on The Big Bang Theory. (And the basketball team was bad enough that Dr. Sheldon Cooper might have been able to play for the Beavers.)

However, Caltech had come close to winning a game a time or three about that time, taking Redlands to overtime three seasons before, hanging around for long stretches with other teams, and they were getting a not-exactly-world-beaters LaVerne team for the final home game of the 2007-08 season.

Alas, they lost 80-74.

Afterward, I talked with a couple of players and then met with coach Roy Dow in his office, upstairs at the gym. We talked about how Caltech could win a game sooner than later if it would enroll a couple of guys each year who had played basketball in high school. Not basketball stars, but guys who had played — and also were worthy candidates for the rigorous Caltech experience.

You can see that column here.

I had done another column on them, a few years before, in which I visited all the “can’t solve this losing streak” memes, and you can see that thing here.

I spoke to Dow for that one, too, and he wasn’t thrilled with it, and I promised him that the 2008 column, on the occasions of their 273rd consecutive SCIAC defeat, would be about the little things Caltech was trying to do to end the SCIAC losing streak.

(Earlier, a Dow team had broken Caltech’s overall losing streak, nonconference as well as SCIAC, at 207 games with a win over Bard in January of 2007.

Anyway, in the course of the conversation he leaned back and pulled a T-shirt out of a box. It was a T-shirt from the “thinker, tinker and stinker” tournament earlier in that season. I happily accepted the gift — and I loved it right off.

I mean, who has real Caltech T-shirts? Picked up while actually on campus? One with (and you can’t see this in the photo) images of the three guys with the weird nicknames in the middle of the “soaring/colliding basketballs” motif?

I wrote about that T-shirt once before, on the occasion of Caltech finally breaking that SCIAC losing streak with a victory over Occidental in 2011. The streak stood at 310, going back to a victory over La Verne in 1985 (!).

Anyway, four years later, I still have that T-shirt in my rotation, and wear it at least a couple of times a month.

I really ought to retire it. The neck has lost its shape, and a small puncture hole has appeared in the lower half, and because those orange basketballs are kinda plasticky, they might start coming loose during one of these washer/dryer session.

And if I retire the Caltech shirt?

It doesn’t get thrown out. Hell no! It gets folded and stuck in the back of the closet with the other T-shirts I brought over to the UAE — as well as those purchased since then.

And when I depart this mortal coil … someone is going to have a lot of T-shirts to choose from or (who are we kidding) immediately throw out. Figure this happening about 38 million times in the next 50 years.