The slow muffled drums fell silent and a solitary piper played Danny Boy as they carried fireman John Downing's body into St Sebastian's in the suburbs where he had grown up.
The Fire Service, that bastion of working-class Irish America, was honouring one of its sons.
For a mile either side of the church on narrow Roosevelt Avenue, up to 8,000 firemen stood to attention, saluting their fallen comrade just as they had done twice on Thursday for two other Irish-Americans killed together in the line of duty. Thousands of local people lined the streets.
Father John Sheehan, a cousin of Mr Downing, had baptised him 40 years ago; now he buried "a genuinely good guy".
Mayor Rudy Giuliani was there, as were all the candidates who hoped to succeed him, as well as Governor Pataki and congressmen.
Mr Downing, an 11-year veteran of the Fire Department, had been studying for his lieutenant's exam when the call to the blaze came on Sunday. He was one of seven children in a close-knit Kerry Irish-American family from this overwhelmingly Irish district of Woodside. One brother joined the service and two are cops.
At his wake on Wednesday and Thursday, firefighters in their dress uniforms of blue jacket and white gloves stood guard over his coffin. On it lay a Yankee's cap, a can of Guinness, and cards from the children. When the call came, Mr Brian Fahey (46), one of the Department's elite rescue teams, with 14 years' service, was eating his lunch listening to Irish music in the station with his friend, Mr Harry Ford (50), a 27-year veteran cited nine times for bravery, who was working on a crossword. They each leave a wife and three children.
Their lives were forfeited, it appears, to a tragic bout of teenage horseplay gone wrong in the yard of a hardware store on Astoria Boulevard - a tin of petrol kicked over accidentally, its contents running down a gulley to a basement where fumes were ignited by a heater. The fire spread fast and fiercely and, as crews entered the building, exploded with a ferocity that toppled walls.
When Mr Ford, a union representative, was buried on Thursday at a funeral attended by over 10,000, Mayor Giuliani asked for a standing ovation from the packed church so that his children could see the esteem in which he was held.
