Somewhere in Denver today is a happy girl who caught the tambourine thrown by the Who's Peter Townshend from the stage of McNichols Arena.

It sailed like a blurred comet over the seats in front of the stage Wednesday night, and settled lightly into her waiting hands. No scramble erupted – no fist fights broke out in the vicinity of the revered flying object. The girl looked about 17. She would have been a toddler when the Who began in 1964.

At 7 p.m. on Wednesday there were more television newsmen than ticket holders outside McNichols Arena. The concert promoters decided to open the doors anyway. A cold rain was falling, drenching the parking lot. About 40 people filed quietly into the arena.

MOST OF THE OTHER 18,000 people arrived between 8:30 and 9. They stood on the upper concourse and yodeled in the rain. They streamed up the stairs and yelped in anticipation along the walkways. The security guards admitted them peaceably, one by one, through the east bank of doors.

Two boys strutted in out of the rain in floor-length capes made out of British union jacks. Inside, people shook the rain from their hair and leaped in sheer exuberance. Down in the floor seats, a barrage of balloons bounced from hand to hand.

Girls in cotton tube-tops clattered down the stairs. Two 300-pound bikers, one on crutches, shouldered their way along the concession tier wearing chains and Harley-Davidson patches.

The PA system blared Led Zeppelin and the Doobie Brothers at unbearable decibels. The lights went down and a roar like the last cry from the damned split the dark as a thousand butane lighters flickered on.

"Rock and roll didn't die, it just ran out of time," one of the members of the Who said a few years ago. No reporter gets to talk to them these days. No photographer is granted a private audience. But the band plays from a low stage and Roger Daltrey confronts the crowd with a muscular workout on the lip of the stage.

Just before the band came out, a stately procession climbed the steps at the left of the stage: three sedate ladies, a tall man in British lounge tweeds and two people in black velvet Who-tour baseball jackets. These are the courti-

NEWS PHOTOS BY DAVID L. CORNWELL Peter Townshend . . . The Who guitarist.

ers and accountants who travel with the royalty of rock and roll.

The Who was in Denver in 1970, 1971 and 1976. There is always the possibility that this time could be the last time. "I hear this tour is for the money," somebody in the crowd murmured.

Townshend and Daltrey pranced in the spotlight. Daltrey backpedaled like a gymnast and crashed into an amplifier, which rocked slightly. The skeletal Townshend flailed at his guitar with his famous windmill attack. He wore a black Cossack jacket and white Hushpuppies.

There were two keyboard men on stage and the synthesizer "twilight zone" chords of "Teen-age Wasteland" began to a roar of recognition from the audience. Townshend squinted through the smoke of a cigarette hanging from his lips and danced around flashing a tambourine.

Roger Daltrey, looking like a pipefitter on holiday, introduced bassist John Entwistle, who could have passed for a hotel manager. "He looks straight (Daltrey pronounced it "strite"), but you should see his underpants," said Daltrey.

BUT NONE OF THESE DETAILS have anything to do with what came from the stage by way of the hanging cliffs of speakers Wednesday. The Who played "Can't Explain," "See Me, Feel Me" and "Summertime Blues." They stayed on the stage for two hours and 15 minutes.

They played for people who had never seen them before and for those who were not sure they would ever see them again. The Beatles' John Lennon turned 40 this year. Peter Townshend is known to have said once that he didn't want to be still up on stage singing "My Generation" when he is 45.

The average age of the audience Wednesday night seemed to hover somewhere around 23. Some of them had waited in line for three days for tickets. And all of them knew every note of every song, as though it were some inviolable tribal ritual being played out at McNichols Arena.

Townshend says rock and roll is "communication between people who are in glass houses. They can't talk to each other, but they can communicate through rock and roll."

"No trouble at all," said a smiling cop who stood with the arm of a pretty girl draped around his waist. "We haven't had any trouble with the crowd at all," he shouted over the roar of music of "Teen-age Wasteland" by the Who.