The best. Not just very good; not merely outstanding. The best.

Who wouldn’t aspire to such an adjective? Vince Lombardi, the legendary Green Bay Packers coach, didn’t coin the phrase “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” — my information comes from David Maraniss’ superb 2000 biography of Lombardi, “When Pride Still Mattered” — but most people seem to think he did, and they like him for it. We’re a land of high achievers and sore losers; maybe we achieve because we’re sore losers. Losing feels lousy. Being the best — ah, there’s the joy.

Still, the “Best American” series published by Houghton Mifflin always annoys me initially, even as I snap up each year’s editions with reckless glee, running a twitchy index finger down a table of contents page to find big-name authors and hopeful nobodies.

It’s the title that irks me. It’s that “best” thing.

“‘Best’?” I tend to mutter to myself. “Who says so? You and what army?”

There is just enough of the combative, ticked-off punk in my personality — if I were male, Mickey Rourke would have to play me in the biopic — to make the “Best American” books a grand opportunity for me to get royally steamed.

And then I generally settle down, read the books and my anger dissipates in a long exhalation of sheer readerly bliss. Because, by and large, the nine books now in the “Best American” stable are pretty terrific. The brand began in 1915 with “The Best American Short Stories.” It was a solo act until 1986, when “The Best American Essays” began its annual appearances, followed by “The Best American Sports Writing,” “The Best American Mystery Stories,” “The Best American Science and Nature Writing,” “The Best American Travel Writing,” “The Best American Nonrequired Reading,” “The Best American Spiritual Writing” and “The Best American Comics.”

Because book titles can’t be copyrighted, other publishers occasionally have cabbaged onto the “Best American” label for their wares, but the Houghton Mifflin series is the original and — dare I say it? — the best.

Year after year, my favorite volume is almost always sportswriting, although my allegiance sometimes swings crazily to science and nature writing, then veers wildly over to spiritual writing and travel writing before returning, like a loyal falcon circling back to the glove, to sportswriting. I’ve always believed that sportswriting is the ultimate challenge, because so many of us think we know everything about sports. Everybody has an opinion about the Bears defense — fix it, quick! — or Brett Favre’s arm strength or Pat Summitt’s drive. To craft a captivating, surprising piece of writing on a topic about which we’re all loudmouth know-it-alls is a considerable achievement.

This year, though, “The Best American Mystery Stories 2008” is the best of “The Best.” It is, moreover, one of the finest anthologies — in any genre — in recent memory. (And as long as we’re talking “best,” let’s wince and take a brief visit to the “worst”: The most disappointing tome in this year’s “Best” roundup is “The Best American Essays 2008,” despite being guest-edited by the world’s best essayist, Adam Gopnik. I’m not sure what happened, but the selections are predictable and the writing uninspired — except for an essay by Lee Zacharias called “Buzzards,” which is wonderful.)

The great crime writer George Pelecanos served as guest editor for “The Best American Mystery Stories 2008,” and he has a lot to be proud of: With only a few exceptions, these stories are amazing. To call them “mysteries” is accurate as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. Yes, the stories are suspenseful, and many involve traditional crimes — robbery, murder, arson — but they manage to wrap their burly arms around the whole spectrum of the human experience, from love to rage, from ecstasy to grief, from boredom to malice, from sex to death, in just a few densely packed pages. No two of these stories sound remotely similar — and yet, taken all in all, they keep you more up-to-the-minute about contemporary life than even those news-flash crawls at the bottom of your TV screen.

Holly Goddard Jones’ “Proof of God” is a harrowing, note-perfect depiction of a confused college student whose life changes forever on one terrible night. Also of special note are “Tunis and Time” by Peter LaSalle, “One Good One” by Chuck Hogan and “At the Top of His Game” by Stephen Rhodes. My favorite story in the collection, however, is Hugh Sheehy’s “The Invisibles,” an eerie tale that builds to a spectacularly unsettling climax. It’s the sort of story you want to read twice, and then you want to call your friends and read it aloud to them too. Literature-induced insomnia is best when shared.

Every year, when the “Best” books are published, I start out annoyed and end up amazed and grateful. I realize once again that the whole “Best” label is less about imposing an iron hierarchy on something as delicate and subjective as art, and more about giving great writing a second chance to be noticed.

The “Best American” moniker sounds like bragging, but it’s the opposite. There is a simple, radiant humility at the heart of these books, a humble plea that we turn up the reading lamp and get comfortable.

No one could likely peruse all of the magazines from which this work is culled; we have to depend on these earnest anthologies to show us what splendors we missed.

BEST OF THE BUNCH

Lee Zacharias: From “Buzzards” in “The Best American Essays 2008”:

“On the ground a group of vultures is called a venue, but a group circling in the air is a kettle, as if they are swirling in a clear cauldron, a school of black fish swimming in a soup of pure air. Ungainly on the ground with their small heads, oversize wings, and heavy bodies, a gait that is at once a lurch and a run, vultures are astonishingly graceful in flight, a glide ‘in God’s fingerprint,’ as George Garrett would have it. … Vultures soar. Unlike most birds, whose breast muscles power the beating of the wings, creating lift and propulsion, a vulture simply opens its wings to the air currents that lift and keep it aloft. … The vulture’s flight is so beautiful because it appears effortless. And in fact it nearly is, for a vulture uses scarcely more energy in flight than it would in standing still.”

J.R. Moehringer: From “Why A Profile of Pete Carroll Does Not Appear in This Space” in “The Best American Sports Writing 2008” :

“Most football coaches are bald, bear-shaped sourpusses. They look like Southern sheriffs, circa 1954. But Carroll is a Hollywood fever dream, a hybrid of Knute Rockne and a rock star (folk rock). He looks like a man who spends his day in the sun. Not the bad sun, the sun of Marlboro Men and aging soap opera actors, but the good sun, the sun of tennis pros and yachtsmen. He’s not leathery, just burnished. His eyes are bright Caribbean blue, and the browner his skin gets, the bluer his eyes turn. His nose is slightly zigzag. It breaks left, then right, a runner in the open field, and his chin is jutting, prominent, always pointing the way forward.”

Holly Goddard Jones: From “Proof of God” in “The Best American Mystery Stories 2008”:

“He hated parties. Hated the music — the mix of hip-hop and Nashville country whose only shared characteristic, as far as Simon could tell, was their God-awfulness. Hated the look of a fraternity house — how a once-decent building could be transformed into a stinking hole that somehow still attracted the good-looking girls. Green, threadbare carpet, stained here and there with beer or wine or urine or puke that had only been soaked up, not properly cleaned. Pictures of fraternity members, framed by year, matted loosely and hanging askew over a fireplace. Maybe he hated the girls the most — not all girls, he didn’t hate women — just the ones who showed up at places such as this one with their fake tans and oily mascara, their bellybutton piercings and side fat. The girls who got in free, cut to the front of the keg line without hearing boo from anyone, then complained all night about the taste of beer the whole time they were getting drunk off of it. Those girls.”