I like hats. The coat rack in my library holds no coats but is adorned with hats. One informs in Chinese that I have climbed the Great Wall of China. Every once in awhile on a sunny summer day when I am wearing it, a Chinese visitor to the Vineyard will stop me and exclaim about it excitedly. It’s a bit of an exaggeration. I haven’t climbed the Great Wall of China. I have walked along it.

Another favorite is a genuine wild west cowboy hat. Another made of rabbit fur comes from some frigid part of Russia. There is a yellow cap from Austria emblazoned with the name of Johann Straus and bearing a picture of the king of waltz. Another is a bright red cap that came from Lafayette, La. There’s a floppy Sunbonnet Sue number (embarrassingly so labeled where everyone can see it). There are wide-brimmed, beribboned straw garden party hats and tight-fitting, toasty warm close-to-the head hats from Scandinavia.

There’s a wide-brimmed black hat with scarf attached that resembles something a Roman Catholic prelate might have worn. Of course there’s a yellow sou’wester for stormy days on the water, and another Chinese hat not made for stormy days since it is constructed from paper that wilts at the fall of a raindrop.

Two high-quality handmade woolen ones are always show-stoppers. One came from Nova Scotia, the other from West Tisbury, where I admired it one evening at a friend’s and was told to take it home as a gift.

And there is a red felt hat that is a dead ringer for the one that Hilary Clinton wore at her husband’s first inauguration. I attended that inauguration. Would that I could have worn it in 2016 for her inauguration.

Now I have another notable hat added to my collection — a black cap with G.O.A.T. emblazoned in red above the brim. Last week when I bought it though, I didn’t know it was notable at all. I smiled graciously when passersby in Boston stopped me and asked where I had found it, how much had it cost and was I willing to sell it? The hat had hardly been my first choice when I got off the Peter Pan bus in South Station on one of last week’s colder days. I’d failed to pop any of the warm, brimmed hats in my collection on top of one the flowered Eastern European peasant babushkas in my collection. (I always wear a babushka beneath my brimmed winter hats to keep my hair from blowing in the wind.)

At the counter in South Station that sells hats and gloves, I chose it from the array on sale only because it was black and matched my coat. I asked if there wasn’t a black cap that said Boston instead but was told a Boston hat would cost me $20, whereas the G.O.A.T. hat was only $10. As I put my $10 down for it, I remembered with a chuckle the goat family that had camped for a cold winter month in a Chilmark summer house a few years ago. The goats had slept comfortably on the sofa, opened sideboard drawers to see what was inside, eaten whatever the summer owners had left behind and had a rollicking good time for awhile. My G.O.A.T hat, if anyone on the Vineyard asked about it, was being worn as a tribute to Chilmark goats, I would say.

The first Bostonian who stopped me and asked where he could buy a G.O.A.T hat was in a Market Basket parking lot I was crossing in Chelsea. The man said he had a friend whose nickname was GOAT and he thought he’d like to have a hat bearing his nickname. That seemed reasonable enough. Then on Beacon Street someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked about my hat. In Harvard Square I had several inquiries. I tried to smile agreeably and wonder what was so special about G.O.A.T. When the bus got me back to the ferry in Woods Hole, I had to run to make it aboard — or so I thought. Not so. A crew member saw my hat and shouted: “Hold it.” As soon as I was safely on board, he and two of his fellow crew members wanted to know where he could buy a G.O.A.T. hat before the game.

What game?

That was before Sunday’s Super Bowl. Now I know the true value of my hat. Obviously I was not at a Super Bowl party chomping pizza. Instead I was enjoying French crepes at a dinner party, because around groundhog time in France, crepes are always on the menu. At the dinner party I told my hat tale and learned at last about my popular headgear.

My fellow dinner guests informed me that G.O.A.T. stood for Greatest of All Time — and didn’t I know that quarterback Tom Brady was the G.O.A.T? I shamefacedly admitted I didn’t know. I also admitted that I had only been to one football game in my life — a Harvard-Yale game seven decades ago when I was at Wellesley College and in love with a Harvard man.

Now of course I will wear my G.O.A.T cap with great pride, and I’ll ask a good high price if I am ever talked into selling it.