It’s improbable that once, millennia ago, men built coliseums and called them such; it’s also unlikely that centuries later men again arrived at coliseums and called them something else. The fierceness and ferocity of competition—but the growing industry and indifference of sport, too—these things are improbable. It’s improbable that even in the age of ESPN and digital ticker tape, of satellite TV and baseball apps, that after the death of the sportswriter, there is still room in this world for the story of the long game, that we’ve made time to tell it the meandering way around, to pull all the strings together. I’m thankful for that. Four home runs in a single game—only fifteen men in the history of the league have done that. Unassisted triple plays: I’ve seen only one. Bases loaded, and Goodyear was playing shallow left, close to the shortstop. Caught a quick-sinking fly—that’s one. Tagged second—that’s two. And touched the runner on his dash from first to second (so certain that Jason would drop it, he was already past the baseman). Three. That was something. Jason was a rookie that year, if my memory stands, and I believe that’s when I first really started to take notice of the man in left. The Lions weren’t even my beat back then—I had the Dodgers. But I watched him grow into his stride like a big-footed puppy, grow into his swing like the lumberjack he’s now known to be. And it was a joy. Later, I had seniority enough to write the weekly sports column, half human interest, half old-man opining, and I got to do more Lions coverage. I was the one to write about it when his first contract expired and ten teams were hoping to nab him, how Stephen Smith went near to the ends of the earth to come up with the cash to keep him in Culver City. I was the one on a soapbox when he was robbed of the MVP in 2006, and I was tossing confetti across the sports page when he won his first, then his second, trophy. Those columns were the kind of writing I thought (wrongly, apparently) a big-market paper needed, and that it had needed, right up until the axman cometh. Anyway, I kept watching. Wife dead too soon, kid grown and working back east—it’s not like I have anything better to do.

But this isn’t a story about my career trajectory or how much I miss my wife. This isn’t about the downfall of newspapers or why my son won’t go ahead and make me a granddad already. It’s about Jason, all the improbable things that got him—us—to this very instant, to right now.