For starters, don’t call them “alleys,” a word that was judged politically incorrect for reasons we don’t quite grasp. These days, they’re “centers,” a more family-friendly moniker. Either way, there are 123 of them scattered across the Garden State. That’s down significantly from the early ‘60s — bowling’s boom days — when New Jersey was home to 500 alleys (sorry, centers).

There have been other changes to the nomenclature. The bowling alleys inside the bowling center (where you send your bowling ball hurtling toward a definite strike) are now called “lanes.” The gutter, which your bowling ball seemed to find no matter how much body English you applied) is now called the channel. This change may be another instance of misapplied politically correct thinking. And the “pit,” where those 10 pins were just begging to be knocked down, is now the “receptacle.”

To get a handle on how popular bowling was in New Jersey in its heyday, 40,000 adults in Bergen County alone belonged to bowling leagues. Paramus Lanes was such a hotspot that heavyweight champion Joe Louis and Jayne Mansfield stopped by to watch the pins go flying.

But Paramus Lanes sold out to SportsWorld, a huge arcade that opened in 1991, where you could host your kid’s birthday party, play laser tag, and feed tokens into pinball machines late into the evening. SportsWorld went dark in 2006. A Raymour & Flanigan furniture outlet took over the space.