RICHMOND — Fifty-five million dollars isn't a magic number. It's the ceiling Attorney General Maura Healey put on Berkshire Museum's sale of its best works of art, which means it's the maximum. It's not a goal to be reached, but rather the point where Healey said the museum must stop.

Now, with sale of all the paintings sent to Sotheby's, the museum has only $53 million. Only? Since the trustees readily accepted Healey's decision to let them sell, they should now accept her office's advice that they stop on the 2-yard line.

It is hard to imagine that the board, including a number of new members, would like to stir the embers of a slowly dying fire and get involved once more with a sizable number of concerned residents who opposed the sale. On top of avoiding another protest, the trustees should back off from new sales just because they have gathered in enough money. More than enough if various neutral analysts are to be believed.

It is taking a long time for opponents of the art sales to move on because they were heavily invested in their belief that art treasures at the museum should stay in the Berkshires, especially since many of the works had been donated by county residents. Those who are still mourning what they cannot change deserve some empathy, plus credit for setting off a national discussion about museums and deaccession.

The trustees, on the other hand, can move on with ease. Their time and thoughts now need to concentrate on investing their wealth properly and figuring out the most pressing needs of the classic museum building in terms of repairs and maintenance. Those of us who shrink from destruction of the Ellen Crane room, so much of it designed by sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder, and the intimate auditorium can only hope that the New Vision will be re-envisioned. Losing Alexander Calder's work was hard enough — dismissing his father's is an added blow to the legacy of Zenas Crane and his generous descendants.

The sale of Norman Rockwell's "Shuffleton's Barbershop" was the greatest shock of the pursuit of $55 million. But the painting, considered one of his best, did not get shipped to China or a mansion in the Hamptons. Instead, without getting to the auction block, it was bought by George Lucas for his new museum, as yet unfinished, in California. A longtime, major supporter of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Lucas has loaned the painting to the museum for two years.

"Shuffleton's Barbershop," for some inexplicable reason, was not on permanent display at the Berkshire Museum. So, if you haven't seen it lately — or ever — and you wonder what all the fuss is about, the famous work is just a few miles from your doorstep. When I took my brother — a major fan of the Saturday Evening Post covers that were always on a living room table in our growing up years — to the Rockwell in August, we found the painting on a side wall. When I went again earlier this month, it had been moved to an end wall and was hung by itself with surrounding pictures, studies and text.

Nostalgia at the Rockwell is not confined to Norman's work. Before you get to the barbershop, those of us who are in the twilight years can revel in the amazing paintings of the prolific Frank Schoonover, who illustrated so many of the books of our childhoods, embedding the faces of Hans Brinker, Heidi, Swiss Family Robinson and the cowboys of Zane Grey in our brains forever.

Moving through the galleries, you can imagine a story of your own for every Rockwell you look at. You laugh at some, you recall childhood occasions with others, you feel an awakening of patriotism.

But the barbershop scene has all of those things, and you have to look a long time, noticing the creel that once held trout, the crack in the window, the old stove and the antique barber chair. And, front and center, a black cat, apparently listening intently to the fiddlers in the back room.

Perhaps we can hope that George Lucas runs into more than the usual construction delays with his project in California.

Ruth Bass remembers Norman and Molly Rockwell's love of Stockbridge where they lived, worked and bicycled.