Augusta, Ga. ? Augusta National just wasn’t ready to say goodbye to Arnold Palmer.

He seemed as reluctant to bid farewell himself.

An outpouring of love and affection was broken up by a downpour that halted Palmer’s celebratory round, bringing the King back for another day to finish his 48th and final Masters.

On a wet and rainy Friday, his aging army sloshed through the mud to cheer Palmer one last time.

He led the fans through the very holes where he first thrilled them more than four decades ago.

Palmer was deep into Amen Corner when the rain came, fresh off a triumphant par on 12, the 2,658th hole he has played in the tournament. He’ll return this morning to finish the 51¼2 holes left in his Masters career.

“I’ll come back to play in the morning,” said Palmer, who won’t make the cut. “I owe it to the crowd.”

The crowd seemed to feel it owed Palmer something, too, rising to its feet and cheering him on hole after hole of a sentimental tour around the course where he won four green jackets.

After 48 years, Palmer was saying goodbye to the Masters, and his fans wanted to say the same to him.

As the rain kept falling, he sat in his car in the parking lot with the lights on, seemingly unwilling to leave.

“I never in all my life of playing golf heard or saw or felt the adulation I felt,” Palmer said. “People were wonderful.”

The golf, though, wasn’t, for a proud man who had known such greatness. He was 9 over through 12 holes, hit a few shots sideways and missed putts.

To his fans, it didn’t matter. He responded through teary eyes by working the gallery like a politician, shaking hands with the men and kissing the women.

By the sixth hole, they had quit posting his score. For once, it didn’t matter. Everyone knew where Arnie stood.

“It’s a little like a funeral where you celebrate a great life,” said longtime Arnie’s Army member Sam Phillips. “It’s a sad day for golf but it’s a celebration of a person who means as much to golf as anyone.”

Palmer, 72, shot an 89 on Thursday and announced that this would be his last Masters. He once vowed to play until he was 100 if invited, but a new beefed-up Augusta National and some hints from Masters officials that aging champions shouldn’t always play convinced him it was time to go.

The fans who followed him since he played his first Masters as a 25-year-old in 1955, tying for 10th with Byron Nelson, wanted to be along for the ride from the first tee on.

They cheered as Palmer unleashed a drive that almost got to the top of the hill on the par-4 first hole.

On the course, Sergio Garcia, 50 years Palmer’s junior, was coming up the adjacent ninth hole when he heard the roar. The Spaniard knew what he felt, though he struggled to put it into English.

“Just listening to that ovation they gave him on the first tee, I was getting, what do you call it, chicken pox,” Garcia said.

Palmer would give them another thrill later when he hit an iron at the devilish par-3 12th hole on the green and two-putted for par. Fans crowded into the bleachers gave him three standing ovations and he replied with a thumbs-up.