What I remember is the smell of him — grass and sweat and the same kid he’d always been under the size of the man he’d become — and the way, for just a second, the fourteen years collapsed into nothing, and every version of him I’d ever held was there at once.

The feverish toddler on my chest at three in the morning.

The seven-year-old who scored his first goal and turned to find my face before he’d even stopped running.

The sullen thirteen-year-old who wouldn’t talk to me for a week and then fell asleep on my shoulder during a movie like nothing had happened.

The boy I’d combed and fed and driven and worried over and loved past all reason.

They were all in my arms over that fence, folded into one enormous young man who was crying into my denim jacket in front of his whole town, and I held onto all of them at once, and I understood that this — not the trophy, not the speech, not the vindication in front of Warren — this was the thing I’d been given.