“We are here to deliver the raw power and energy of rock and roll,” Bruce Springsteen declared to the amped crowd of 30,000 or so believers on an energetic weekday night in Syracuse, N.Y.

“I am here to accept the raw power and energy of rock and roll,” I shouted back, down, down, downward the stage and likely out, out, out to the image on the big screen.

Oh, how fitting, thought I.

My music and muse since that day in high school …

Springsteen’s music captured my attention as a high school teen in the 1970s when Spanish classmate Margie brought in his album “The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle” for show and tell.

I’ve been fortunate enough to find my way to a live show every decade since the early 1980s and my initial jaw-dropping experience at the Capital Centre in Landover, Md. This week’s concert makes it a five-decade streak. The concerts number in the 40s. I wish I had not lost count, but I’ve seen Bruce in Albany and Rochester and Buffalo and Saratoga and Cleveland and Vernon Downs and the Landmark Theatre and … multiple times at most, sure.

I chased the Ghost of Bruce Springsteen around his New Jersey haunts during his Ghost of Tom Joad days and came away with no He’s Back! sightings but a batch of memories and a sprawling Sunday newspaper story that sort of satisfied me.

This latest live show, Bruce and the E Street Band were on stride. He seemed relaxed. Fit. Having fun. Sharing his words, his energy and his physical space with the fans in the pit.

Towering reminder.

His powerful songs from “The Rising,” the album that helped many sort out emotions and start healing from 9/11, are sharp in messages still but maybe a little rounder rocks of comfort from the tears of time that have washed over their edges.

He started with “Lonesome Day,” and also found his way to “My City of Ruins.” Before reaching “The Rising, ” the title cut from “Wrecking Ball” also fit the theme of loss and reclamation. During the latter, strobe lights first danced across the dome and then found a place. I was convinced they made me think of the Manhattan lights first given the chore to memorialize our two lost towers.

Anyway, I turned to my friends Chris, whom I brought along for his very first live Bruce show, and decided: “Since the start, no matter how much pain and sorrow he puts in his songs, there’s always room for hope.”

And as he tells of lost friends and helps us all relate to those gone in our lives:

“He’s my poet laureate.”

And so I sing along to every word of “Thunder Road,” happy to follow Mary’s journey across her front porch to his front seat through five decades now.

Me and Chris waiting for that first song.