Some people hated him when he refused to be drafted during the Vietnam War, a decision that cost him his heavyweight title. But more people admired him, even loved him, for his principled stands, his high spirits, his lightning mind, his winking self-regard and, yes, his rhyming motormouth. Until illness closed in, little could contain him, certainly not mere ropes around a ring.

Palmer, too, was transformational, golf’s first media star. The gentleman’s game was never quite the same after he began gathering an army on the rolling greenswards and leading a charge, his shirt coming untucked, a cigarette dangling from his lips, his club just that, a weapon, as he pressed the attack. An entire generation of middle-class postwar guys took up the game because of Arnie, and not a few women did, too. He was athletically blessed, magnetically cool, telegenically handsome — but he was somehow one of them, too.

The same was said of Gordie Howe, Mr. Hockey, a son of the Saskatchewan prairie who tore up the National Hockey League, hung up his skates at 52 and died at 88; and of Ralph Branca, a trolley car conductor’s son who was a living reminder that one crushing mistake — his, the fastball to Bobby Thomson that decided the 1951 National League pennant — can sometimes never be lived down.

Pat Summitt, the coach who elevated women’s basketball, led her Tennessee teams to eight championships and won more games than any other college coach, could not defeat Alzheimer’s disease, dying at 64. And within months the National Basketball Association lost two giants from different eras. Clyde Lovelette, an Olympic, college and N.B.A. champion who transformed the game as one of its first truly big men, was 86; his hardwood heir Nate Thurmond, a defensive stalwart who battled Russell, Wilt and Kareem in the paint in a 14-year Hall of Fame career, was 74.

Even older, in the baseball ranks, was Monte Irvin. When he died at 96, there were few people still around who could remember watching him play, particularly in his prime, in the 1940s, when he was a star on the Negro circuit but barred from the whites-only major leagues. He made the Hall of Fame anyway as a New York Giant and became Major League Baseball’s first black executive, but when he died, fans pondered again the question that has hung over many an athletic career shackled by discrimination: What if?

A different question, in an entirely different sphere, arose after the stunning news that Justice Antonin Scalia had died on a hunting trip in Texas: What now? In the thick of one of the most consequential Supreme Court careers of modern times, he left a void in conservative jurisprudence and, more urgently, a vacancy on the bench that has yet to be filled, raising still more questions about what may await the country.

Other exits from the public stage returned us to the past. Nancy Reagan’s death evoked the 1980s White House, where old-Hollywood glamour and well-heeled West Coast conservatism took up residence on the banks of the Potomac. John Glenn’s had us thinking again about a long-ago burst of national pride soaring into outer space.