Back in the day, some of those Arizona slopes were two miles tall. Taller than that even, to start, but like an octogenarian back in uniform for the old-timers’ game, we all lose a few inches. Hell, I’m two inches and eight pounds shy of my peak, which I hit during my junior year of college, when I was just a tick younger than Corey. The school was in need of a catcher (the recruit had a broken arm) and I, being Little League friends with the team’s ace, was called on to catch. We were D-II and no one expected much, though we won more games than we lost when I was behind the plate. After the season I went back to my English major and to slowly shrinking, but that time on the field, a couple of months of orchestrating the team from behind the plate, I think it always gave me a leg up with the athletes. Looked like one of them, at least until I started looking like one of their coaches. Aging’s a bitch.

But I was talking about mountains. Take a look at the McDowell Mountains, bordering Scottsdale to the east—that’s a fine example. They started as nearly perfect basaltic cones. But wind picked up the valley floor and blew dirt in the mountains’ faces; the softest stone slipped away with the insult. Not everything has the steely nerve of Stephen Smith, the fortitude to remain flawless under attack. Stephen can stay strong, but mountains, lesser men, they crack and crumble. Today, the McDowells are all jagged, and the tallest of them: four thousand feet.

There was another element at play in the mountains’ demise: water. So much water. Hard to believe it on a day as blue-skied as this one, the stiff-armed saguaros the only green beyond the stretch of Salt River Fields’ irrigation, I know. But it did rain, for days and weeks and years. And that falling water traveled in flashes down the new mountainsides, pushing for an extra base with all the momentum it could muster. With each rain, the water was widening the base path, picking up stones and carrying them down, carving until there was a clear route, one that cut deeper and quicker than any other. Water flowed into a divot that became a crevice, a crevice that became a canyon, a canyon that became the bed of the new Salt River. And the Salt River became a path to follow, all the way to the now-far ocean.

By dust and by deluge, diminishment. It is inevitable, in mountains and in men. But over the following week, as news of his run-in at Taliesin spreads, Jason’s team sweeps into action, holding up so many umbrellas over his head. A whole bevy of folks, attempting to keep him dry. Damage control, they call it, trying to hold up the mountainside. Jason has never been one to seek the diva treatment, doesn’t like an entourage or attention, the kind of thing most people expect out of celebrity athletes. He’s a good leader in the clubhouse, stoic but kind, highly motivational or slightly goofy as the situation requires, but he hardly socializes off the field—which makes this spring’s babysitting, the rabid-with-concern attention, that much more frustrating. He holds his own umbrella. No, better yet, he wears a raincoat.