This is the time of year for the formal, though not required, swearing-in ceremonies of elected officials in their home districts. They are usually for rookie legislators, like the one on Saturday night at the stately Gould Memorial Hall at Bronx Community College for newly minted State Senator Gustavo Rivera, a newcomer politician who is no newcomer to politics, having worked on the staff of other legislators — including Kirsten Gillibrand and Andrea Stewart-Cousins — and on the 2008 Obama campaign in Florida.

Rivera was backed by a star-studded cast of New York Democrats and they all seemed to want to be on hand for the event. Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer, Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., former borough president Fernando Ferrer, and many more were there to mark a rare, lopsided victory over the powerful and controversial incumbent Pedro Espada.

Ferrer, who spoke seamlessly, almost poetically, without notes (at a reception after the event, he told the Norwood News he learned his oratorical skills on that very campus when it was NYU, from Professor Jack Hasch, who made students read an article for three minutes and then speak about it for three minutes), welcomed Rivera and expressed a relief that was a common theme of the evening.

“We, at last, after 34 flaky years, have a great senator in [the 33rd] District who will make us proud,” Ferrer declared, referring to Rivera’s two predecessors, Efrain Gonzalez, who is serving a seven-year prison sentence for fraud, and Israel Ruiz, a perennial burr under the saddle of the borough’s Democratic establishment, who also spent time in jail for lying on a loan application.

Asked later why he supported Gonzalez in the past, Ferrer said, “We thought he was an alternative to … Izzy Ruiz.” Ferrer, now a partner at Mercury Public Affairs, said Ruiz was a distant cousin, which just goes to show, “you can pick your nose, and pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family.”

The event, laced with rhetoric on morality, ethics and the maturation of the Bronx body politic, felt like a civic Bar Mitzvah. Schumer opened with a moment of silence for those killed and injured in that morning’s tragic shooting in Arizona, before launching into praise for Rivera, who he said “climbed up the ladder the hard way,” and then reciting a sermon-like story about Benjamin Franklin and the meaning of democracy that many present had heard many times before (Schneiderman put the number at 18 but jokingly added that it was one of Schumer’s best tellings of it).

Echoing Ferrer, Diaz Jr. said Rivera’s election was a “check of the moral compass of the people of the Bronx … who said no to decades of people who wanted to represent their own self interest and pad their own pockets.”

The only quizzical note of the evening was when Assemblyman Carl Heastie, chairman of the Bronx Democratic County Committee, came up to the lectern and said he considered himself “captain of the team” rather than party boss. But, as anyone at all familiar with the Rivera campaign knows, “Captain” Heastie remained on the sidelines, withholding party support from Rivera to the very end.

Of course, the night was about Rivera, who took a good-natured ribbing from his proud dad, Jose Rivera (ironic, but no relation to the former party boss who endorsed Espada) who introduced him. His mother was in attendance as well and all the politicians paid tribute to the couple, who still live in Rivera’s native Puerto Rico.

Rivera spoke crisply and energetically from the only prepared speech of the night. He called himself a “proud, unapologetic, out-of-the-closet progressive,” and called for a series of Albany reforms, including the first bill he introduced mandating the disclosure of all outside income; redistricting reform — “voters should choose their representatives and not the other way around,” he said — and making the legislature full-time.

He called on those present to “counsel me if you see me falter.”

“I do not ask for your trust,” he said in closing. “I’m going to work to earn your trust.”