PHILADELPHIA ON A GOOD DAY can seal the deal even for those who didn't know they were shopping for a city, let alone buying. On a good day, Philadelphia can make those of us who live here ache with pride and the wonder of it all. On a good day this city virtually glows; the brick is never so red, the glass spires of Center City gleam like the skyline of Oz, the sidewalks are clean and vibrant with shiney happy people having fun.

On such pinch-me days Philadelphia looks like the prettiest girl at the dance and she's going home with you. And Philadelphia has been enjoying a string of such matchless days, good tempered June weather, with bright mornings, clear afternoons and breezy evenings. And such was the weather that greeted the 127 members of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists each day during their four-day conference in Center City that ended this morning.

What I can almost guarantee is some amazing good press about Philadelphia in the days and weeks to come from the visiting columnists. And such confidence on my part that out-of-town journalists will write raves rather than take cheap shots at our city is a relatively new mindset. There was a time when Philadelphians expected to be trashed by hipper-than-thou scribes who teed up W.C. Fields jokes and the latest municipal embarrassments and took a couple of easy swings to make the folks back home feel better because at least they didn't live in Philadelphia.

In those days the very concept of boasting about Philadelphia on a good day would have been like the famous New Yorker cartoon showing two lady hippopotamuses looking longingly at a male hippopotamus wallowing in a mud hole. One lady hippopotamus whispers to the other, "He's almost too good looking." As a lifelong Philadelphipotamus I've always been in love with the beauty of this city, mud and all. But it's kind of nice to feel this relatively new phenomenon of confidence that others will see what we see, and love what we love. Philadelphia on a good day is like that.

Stu Bykofsky, the Daily News columnist who lobbied for Philadelphia as the site of the 31st annual NSNC conference, and who organized the official events, receptions and sight-seeing activities said this columnist conclave was the most successful in the organization's history. And it was the city and its people that won rave reveiws. "People kept coming up to me during the conference telling me how friendly Philadelphians are, how clean the city was, how much they loved walking the streets." And not one columnist asked about the murder rate.