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Another birthday has crept up and landed. So has the oldest cliché.

Yes, I have considered the alternative. No, I’m not ready to embrace it.

But while rummaging through the usual birthday emotions — ho-hum, boo-hoo, bah-humbug, just-another-day — I suddenly got zapped by a bolt of reminiscence.

I just turned 78. What does that number evoke?

Why, 78 RPM records, of course.

They have not been made since the 1950s. They were supplanted, in very short order, by 45s and 33s. But this child of the 1940s remembers those stiff platters made of shellac resin very well.

Walk down Memory Lane with me, if you will…“Blue Suede Shoes” by Carl Perkins, “El Paso” by Marty Robbins, “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets, “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford.

I owned these and many more 78s. It’s a wonder I didn’t wear out the grooves, so often did I play them. Of course, I knew each number by heart. So, I’d sing along, as loudly as I could.

There were two major benefits to that. One, I would cement those lyrics of long ago into my brain forever. Two, I would greatly annoy my younger brother, who shared a room with me (but never my record collection or my turntable — some things are just too precious).

Sometimes, for the sake of variety, I’d raid a cabinet in the living room, where the 78s belonging to my parents were kept. Welcome to Bing Crosby, show tunes and some kid from New Jersey named Sinatra.

I would borrow a stack of them and head back to my room. As you’ll recall, each side of a 78 lasted three and a half minutes at most. So as each final chord sounded, I’d lift the still-spinning record off its base and replace it with another.

As the disk jockeys of that era would always say, the hits just kept on coming.

But 78s did not. They were brittle and prone to cracking. They were harder to handle and store than smaller and more flexible 45s. As for 33 1/3s, the future clearly belonged to them. Who wouldn’t want eight songs per side as opposed to one?

And yet…

For an art project at school, I combed through my collection and pasted a few 78s onto a large piece of cardboard. The project did not win any prizes, but no one else thought to use records in such an unusual way.

For a dance at the home of The Girl I Had Designs On, I brought along an armful of my hottest hits. Make that two arms full. Alas, the girl was not impressed, either by my arm strength or me.

Then there was the time my brother and I had a major fight, conducted with 78s. He stole a bunch of them from my stash, without asking. Outraged, I went after him with murder in my eyes.

He retaliated by flinging one 78 after another at my approaching self. Those hard disks really hurt when they bash against one’s ribs. But you go to war with the weapons you have. Mine were on the ground, around my ankles.

Without considering how many of my precious 78s I might be about to break, I picked up an armful and frisbeed them at my brother, one after the other. An improvised carpet-bomb attack, if you will.

The good news: No one was injured. The better news: None of my collection was harmed. Of course, my brother claimed to my parents that I had started it. Don’t younger siblings always do that?

As the 1960s approached, it became obvious that 78s deserved to go the way of running boards and silent movies. My collection of 78s moldered on a shelf. My collection of 33s and 45s grew like a summer weed.

I don’t recall what became of my 78s. Probably, my mother gave them away — the same way she gave away my collection of baseball cards (sob).

Any or all of them would be worth zillions today, I’m sure. But Mama was more concerned at that moment with shelf space and eliminating dust.

So maybe this 78th birthday I’ve just celebrated — though it doesn’t end in a five or a zero — is really as epic as those milestones.

It calls to mind a stiff, awkward jet-black slab that kept kids smiling and dancing. Seventy-eights had their deficits, for sure. But like other products of yesteryear, they still bring grins of remembrance.

Bob Levey is a national award-winning columnist.