NEW YORK -- Mariano Rivera, the Yankees' Hall of Fame-bound closer, keeps insisting that he expects his overriding emotion during this, his last season, to be joy. But he also knows that being the last major leaguer still wearing Jackie Robinson's No. 42 every day of the season confers on him an extra distinction that carries the import of his career's end far beyond New York: When he goes, Robinson's number will go into retirement with him. The only exception will be the one day each year -- April 15th -- when big league field personnel everywhere wear 42 as a tribute to Robinson on the anniversary of his 1947 debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

But Rivera predicts that even when the occasion arrives on Monday (or Tuesday for teams like the Yankees, who are off on Monday), he will look around, soak it in and feel the same as he always has.

"I think it's beautiful," Rivera says, citing the once-a-year visual of all his fellow 42s-for-a-day mingling around the batting cage, running onto the diamond, standing at attention as the national anthem is played, or hustling around the field once the games begin. Rivera grew up in Panama knowing about Latin stars Juan Marichal and Roberto Clemente before he became aware of Robinson. He likes the symbolism of all these latter-day 42s -- be they African-Americans or whites or Latinos -- standing on equal footing. The tribute to Robinson is meant to ensure that no one forgets that this wasn't always so.

"Jackie Robinson was a great man," Rivera said over the weekend before a game against the Baltimore Orioles. "I have always said that wearing this number is a privilege and a great responsibility … to represent what Jackie represented for us, as a minority, and for all of baseball in general, it's tremendous. For me, it's just a privilege to wear and to try to keep that legacy. It makes me want to be at my best. And that's what I tried to do my whole career."

Rivera has been more than worthy of the legacy of Jackie Robinson's number. Hannah Foslien/Getty Images

When commissioner Bud Selig declared in 1997 that Robinson's number would no longer be issued -- it was the 50th anniversary of the day Robinson integrated baseball -- Rivera was among 13 players still wearing 42.

Most of the others were workaday players -- Kirk Reuter, Jose Lima, Butch Huskey. The exception was Mo Vaughn, the burly first baseman who burned bright for a few years and won the 1995 American League Most Valuable Player award before flaming out with the Mets. "Everybody else started retiring," says Rivera, now 43, "and pretty soon I was the only one left, you know? And so it was even more responsibility. And I learned it was more than just the number."

Since 2003, Rivera has been the only 42. And his Yankees teammate, Robinson Cano, finds a sort of poetic justice in that.

"Things happen for a reason," Cano has said.

Cano meant that Rivera is the perfect combination of grace and class, baseball ability and unstinting professionalism to still be standing when the crowd winnowed down to just two: Mo, the greatest closer and one of the best teammates there's ever been, and Robinson, the most important athlete of the 20th century to many people. Robinson was different than Joe Louis, because he wasn't allowed to fight back against the elements in the game that resisted him. He was less overtly political at his career's start than Muhammad Ali, who didn't splash down big until years after Robinson arrived with the Dodgers, but Ali certainly owed a lot to Robinson's groundbreaking example.