The Numbers Heading to Times Square: 2-0-2-4

Good morning. It’s Monday. We’ll look at what goes on behind the scenes in Times Square before the ball falls on New Year’s Eve. We’ll also find out about free online therapy for teenagers.

It’s time for the countdown to the countdown. There’s a lot to do before everyone looks up at the skinny building in Times Square and chants “10-9-8-7 …”

• Next year’s numerals — two giant 2s, one 0 and one 4 — are scheduled to arrive on Wednesday after riding across the country on a trailer, towed by an electric sport utility vehicle. They left Inglewood, Calif., at the beginning of the month.

• A confetti test on Dec. 29 will send 75 pounds of colored streamers into the air. That is one-fortieth of the ton and a half that will be thrown by hand, by more than 100 volunteers, on New Year’s Eve. They do not use confetti cannons.

• The ball will fall in daylight on Dec. 30 in preparation for its role the next night. “Every Broadway show requires a dress rehearsal,” a spokeswoman for the organizers said.

What about One Times Square, the building that serves as the stage for the ball drop?

“This will be a New Year’s Eve under construction,” said Michael Phillips, the president of Jamestown, the real estate firm that has owned One Times Square since 1997.

Jamestown recently had a topping-out ceremony for its $500 million reinvention of One Times Square, which will add immersive, technology-driven displays to a building that took shape when the Wright brothers had just flown their airplane and air-conditioning had only recently been invented.

“The wins and losses of our lives have played out against this building,” Phillips said, mentioning ticker-tape parades and V-J Day at the end of World War II. “All the technology that’s going into this building just amplifies that.”