The clip made its rounds within hours: Meadow Soprano, grown and composed behind a microphone at Citi Field, carrying “The Star-Spangled Banner” out over a ballpark. By the time it reached most feeds it had already been recaptioned as something it was never meant to be — a farewell.

Because that same afternoon, word came that Vincent Pastore was gone. The internet, which prefers a tidy story to a true one, stitched the two together on the spot: the anthem became a tribute, the coincidence became intention. It wasn’t. Jamie-Lynn Sigler had been booked to sing long before the day turned heavy. What the misreading reveals is more interesting than the mix-up itself.

A show has to be a particular kind of thing before a stray ballgame can be mistaken for its memorial. Nearly two decades after it signed off, HBO’s mob epic does not behave like an old series in reruns. It behaves like an institution — perpetually streaming, endlessly quoted, adopted by viewers too young to have caught it the first time — and its cast is treated less as former colleagues than as an extended family the public keeps vigil over. When one of them dies, the mourning is communal by reflex.

The real tribute, when it came, was quieter and truer to that family. Sigler didn’t need a stadium; she posted a few plain words, calling Pastore a wonderful actor and a kind and loving man, an honor to have known and worked with. Michael Imperioli called him a “kind-hearted brother.” Steven Van Zandt, who knows a little about second acts, wrote that another irreplaceable brother was gone and that it never gets easier. Lorraine Bracco remembered a beautiful soul. Notice the vocabulary: not co-stars, brothers.

It suits the man they were burying. Pastore played Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero, and the part was no anonymous muscle in the background. The informer is the oldest figure in the gangster canon — the rat the genre exists to punish, from the stool pigeons of the Warner Bros. thirties through the sweating paranoia of “Goodfellas,” a picture Pastore himself passed through. The Sopranos took that stock figure and did what it did to every cliché it touched: it made him human first, so that his betrayal and his death would cost something. Big Pussy wasn’t cut down on a street corner. He was taken out to sea by men who loved him, which is a different and far harder scene to sit through.

That Pastore could carry it is its own small marvel. He came to screen acting late, his first credited film arriving in 1988 when he was already in his forties, and spent barely thirty episodes as Big Pussy across a run that stretched from 1999 to 2007 — killed at the close of the second season, then pulled back as memory and hallucination. He won a Screen Actors Guild ensemble award with the company, kept working to the end (a turn on “Yellowjackets” only last year), and once told Howard Stern that the actors received the script for his character’s execution just four days before the cameras rolled.

So no, the anthem at Citi Field was not a goodbye to Vincent Pastore. It only felt like one because The Sopranos long ago stopped being a thing we watch and became a thing we belong to — and a family that large never quite finishes burying its dead.

Tags: obituaries, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Michael Imperioli, The Sopranos, Vincent Pastore

Jamie-Lynn Sigler’s Mets Anthem Wasn’t a Vincent Pastore Tribute — ‘The Sopranos’ Turned It Into One

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