F orty years?

Heck, Neil Leifer deleted all memory of The Colisee/Central Maine Civic Center/Central Maine Youth Center/St. Dominic’s Arena 40 hours after he unwittingly produced the photographic equivalent of “Do You Believe in Miracles?”

As for what unfolded during that forgotten visit to a forgettable hockey rink, Leifer has preserved popes, presidents and pole vaulters with a surgeon’s touch, and untrained eyes would tell you he still hasn’t recreated the snapshot of Sonny Liston devolving to has-been at Muhammad Ali’s expense.

So there was the 62-year-old Leifer on Tuesday afternoon, scouting out the freshly painted premises, dusting off the lens cap in his mind and trying to, well, re-create his click into immortality.

“Hey, Phil,” the New Yorker hollered from his perch in the top row of bleachers to the arena floor. “Can we do something about the scoreboard?”

Phil is Phil Nadeau, Lewiston’s assistant city administrator and the guy responsible for the phone and e-mail exchange that brought Leifer back to the place photographer and time forgot.

Nadeau set up the two dozen 1,000-watt light fixtures, the old-fashioned, three-rope ring, the white canvas you couldn’t find in captivity anywhere, and the three rows of garage sale-ready press tables. He hadn’t considered the scoreboard with the newspaper and beer advertisements on it.

Or had he?

“Sure, anything you like. I just can’t move it,” Nadeau needled back, before whispering to a visitor, “That Colisee logo up there is great advertising.”

Leifer will spend this morning taking pictures of an empty boxing ring in an empty arena for Sports Illustrated, an assignment that tells us everything we need to know about the power of a moment.

Forty years ago tonight, arguably the most famous athlete ever to roam the planet sauntered to the center of a late-arriving ring at a last-minute site in the middle of nowhere and defended what was then the preeminent title in sports.

On what he calls a year-long Senior Citizen Tour project, Leifer will file away photos of blue-collar men booing Jeff Gordon’s victory at the Daytona 500, wagering wine-and-cheesers lamenting Giacomo’s triumph at the Kentucky Derby and an unoccupied canvas unspoiled by corporate logos and hotel or casino come-ons. And he hopes that somehow, in some otherworldly way, he, you and I might swear we see some manifestation of the two men involved in that so-called Phantom Punch.

“At a Super Bowl, you’re expected to photograph the winning touchdown. In the World Series, you’re supposed to get the deciding play at the plate,” Leifer said. “I don’t want to say this is the ghost of Ali-Liston II, but that’s kind of what I’m hoping for.”

As a line in the history books, there’s nothing to separate this championship prizefight from, say, Lamon Brewster knocking the bejeebers out of Andrew Golota last Saturday night.

May 25, 1965. Lewiston, Maine. Muhammad Ali KO 1 Sonny Liston.

You had to be there. Leifer was. Most of us weren’t.

Forty years have passed, precisely enough time for a majority of us to be born, stumble through school, fall in love, not inhale, get hired, get fired, get married, get hired somewhere else, go into debt, have two kids, see a therapist, lose hair, gain weight, try the South Beach Diet and lament our lost youth.

This textile town, this frozen pond, this center of the universe for two minutes on a Tuesday night; they’ve changed, too.

The non-descript hockey rink is a beauty. Where one foot-by-one foot windows once obscured the view of a mud pit masquerading as a parking lot, there’s now a daylight-drenched hospitality room equipped with five large-screen televisions blaring CNN or ESPN. The open air even smells like progress.

“Two years ago,” said Nadeau, “we could have given Neil a facility that was more faithful to what it looked like in 1965, and frankly, that would have been the bad news.”

More good news:

Our population is more diverse. Our tolerance for an athlete with a different skin tone professing his faith in a different religion would be off-the-charts higher.

Our city’s fathers (and mothers) are no longer content to apologize meekly for our eyesores. They’ve built and rebuilt monuments worth a Kodak moment, inside and out.

Ali’s leveling of Liston initially did more for the world at large than for Lewiston.

But it did give us an anniversary to celebrate, and that means maybe, just maybe, these 40-year-old footnotes about what was will give us a vision of what could be.

Or perhaps the itinerant artist said it best Tuesday afternoon.

“You hope to close one’s eyes,” Leifer said of his nostalgic visit, “and have them imagine it’s a full arena again.”

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].