There are moments in life when two seemingly unrelated paths intersect, when something as ordinary as a football Saturday suddenly becomes tangled with questions that have very little to do with football. Sometimes those intersections are unexpected, arriving quietly and leaving us to discover their meaning only after we have had time to reflect. Other times, they arrive with such force that we cannot help but recognize that something inside us has changed.
For those who follow me on social media, you already know this has been a difficult week. For those who don’t, a very close friend of mine, someone I had known for nearly 40 years, passed away Wednesday. His name was Victor, and describing him as a friend feels almost inadequate for the place he occupied in my life. He was a brother, a mentor, a confidant and one of those rare people whose presence becomes so intertwined with your own history that imagining the world without him feels almost impossible.
Victor was also a father, a husband, a brother, an uncle and a baseball coach who touched countless lives in ways he probably never fully understood. I have struggled to comprehend the depth of my own grief, and I cannot begin to imagine what his twin sister has been experiencing. There is something especially heartbreaking about that relationship, two people whose lives began together now separated by something neither could have prepared for, no matter how many years they were fortunate enough to share.
When someone occupies that much space in your life, their absence is not confined to the moment you learn they are gone. It settles into the ordinary things, into memories you did not realize you were carrying and conversations you assumed there would always be time to finish. You find yourself remembering something funny they said 20 years ago, wanting to pick up the phone to share something that happened yesterday or simply wondering how the world can continue moving along when someone who helped shape your own has suddenly stopped moving through it.
I have spent much of the past several days thinking about that reality, about friendship, family and the strange mathematics of growing older. Every trip we make around the sun is another opportunity to experience the extraordinary gift of being alive, but it also moves us closer to the inevitability of losing people we love. We understand that intellectually when we are young, but understanding something and experiencing it are two very different things.
As the years accumulate, so do the empty chairs. The names in our phones that we can no longer call. The stories that begin with a smile and end with the sudden realization that someone who was there when the story happened is no longer here to tell their side of it.
We like to believe there will be a better time to lose someone, or at least a time when we will be more prepared for the pain. But there isn’t. The loss of someone we love never arrives at a moment that makes sense, never comes with instructions for how to absorb it and never becomes less consequential simply because we have lived long enough to understand that death is inevitable.
The people we love do not disappear from the lives they helped create. Their absence simply changes the way we carry them.
And sometimes, if we are fortunate, they find a way to remind us of that.
Saturday, Victor’s niece stopped by our tailgate.
I have known her since she was nine years old, back when she was a little girl growing up in a family that had long since become an extension of my own. In the years that followed, she became part of the collection of people and memories that make nearly four decades of friendship impossible to separate into neat categories. She was never merely my friend’s niece. She was family to me, too.
There was something profoundly special about seeing her there, particularly after the week we had all experienced. Her presence brought together the life I had shared with Victor and the life I continue to live, two worlds that ordinarily coexist without requiring much thought. For a few moments, the distance between those worlds seemed to disappear, and I was reminded that the people we lose remain with us through the people they loved.
I don’t know that I will ever be able to adequately explain what that visit meant to me. There are gestures that become meaningful not because of anything extraordinary that happens during them, but because of everything that happened before. Nearly 40 years of friendship, a lifetime of shared history and a little girl I had known since she was nine were suddenly standing together in the same moment, even though one of the people who connected them was no longer there.
It was one of those moments when grief and gratitude become almost indistinguishable.
And perhaps that was part of why Saturday’s game affected me in a way that had very little to do with the final score.
The Things That Keep Us Moving
I have done a lot over the past five months to improve my health and, hopefully, increase the number of trips around the sun I still have ahead of me. It has required changes, discipline and a renewed willingness to take responsibility for things that become easier to ignore as we grow older. None of us knows how much time remains, but I have come to believe there is considerable value in doing what we can with the time we have been given.
Yet amid those efforts, another feeling has stayed with me for a long time, one that has been more difficult to identify and considerably harder to address.
Connection.
Or, more precisely, the sense that some of the connections that once gave life its texture have become increasingly difficult to maintain.
People move. Careers change. Children grow up and begin building lives of their own. The friends who once seemed to occupy every weekend become people we promise to call when things slow down, even though things rarely seem to slow down. The familiar gathering places disappear, the conversations become less frequent and the world that once felt intimately connected gradually becomes a collection of separate lives moving in different directions.
Some of that is natural. Much of it is unavoidable. But acknowledging that reality does not mean we have to accept every consequence that comes with it.
I have thought about this often when people ask why I continue to work as hard as I do.
I still have a demanding day job, responsibilities that require considerable attention and an age at which plenty of people begin thinking seriously about slowing down. There is a version of the good life that involves fewer obligations, longer mornings, more time to relax and the opportunity to enjoy the things we have spent decades working to achieve.
I understand the appeal. I genuinely do, and I don’t begrudge anyone who has worked hard enough to reach that point and wants to enjoy it.
But I have never been particularly good at standing still.
Writing has been part of my life for so long that separating it from who I am would be like trying to distinguish the memories of Victor from the person those experiences helped me become. I don’t write because I need another job, because I believe every opinion I have deserves an audience or because I am incapable of enjoying a quiet afternoon. I write because there are things I still want to understand, stories I still want to tell and connections I still want to make.
There is a particular satisfaction in spending hours working through an idea until the words finally begin to express what you have been struggling to understand. Sometimes that happens in a football analysis. Sometimes it happens in a conversation with a reader who sees something differently. And sometimes, as happened this week, writing becomes the only way I can begin to make sense of something for which I have no satisfying explanation.
I have always felt that way about the work. I suspect I always will.
The poet Dylan Thomas famously urged us not to go gently into that good night, to rage against the dying of the light. His words have become a familiar expression of resistance to mortality, but for me, the instinct he described existed long before I had ever heard his name or encountered his poetry.
I have been pushing against the dying of the light for as long as I can remember.
Not because I believed I could outrun time or somehow escape the inevitable, but because I have never been comfortable with the idea that growing older should mean becoming less curious, less engaged or less willing to challenge myself. There has always been something inside me that resisted the suggestion that the best years must eventually become memories rather than possibilities.
I don’t want to stop learning. I don’t want to stop building. I don’t want to wake up one morning and discover that I have quietly surrendered the things that once made me feel most alive.
And perhaps most importantly, I don’t want to stop connecting.
The work I do here at Duck Sports Central is part of that resistance. Every article, every conversation, every new idea and every friendship that grows from this strange little corner of the world represents another opportunity to remain engaged with something beyond myself. The hours are long, the financial rewards are hardly the reason to keep doing it and there are certainly easier ways to spend whatever free time my day job allows.
But easier has never been the same thing as better.
Some people spend their later years trying to eliminate obligations. I have spent much of my life trying to find pursuits meaningful enough to justify taking on more of them. Neither approach is inherently superior, but I know which one allows me to recognize the person looking back at me in the mirror.
For me, living the good life has never meant doing less of what makes me feel alive.
It means refusing to let those things disappear simply because the calendar suggests I should be ready to slow down.
Where Two Different Worlds Meet
Which brings me back to Saturday afternoon and Oregon’s loss to UCLA.
I want to be careful about the comparison, because losing a football game is not remotely comparable to losing someone you love. One is a temporary disappointment within a game we choose to follow. The other changes the shape of your life in ways that may never become entirely comfortable.
But experiences do not have to carry equal weight to illuminate something about one another.
Sometimes the same idea can emerge from two very different circumstances, and the intersection reveals something we might otherwise have overlooked.
As I watched Oregon struggle through much of Saturday’s game, I kept returning to a feeling that had been bothering me for much of the season. There is talent on this roster, considerable effort from individual players and a coaching staff that has repeatedly emphasized the importance of connection. Yet there have been stretches when the team has looked less like a group moving toward a common purpose than a collection of individuals trying desperately to make something happen.
The offensive line struggles to establish continuity. The quarterback searches for answers that do not always appear to be available. Receivers work to create opportunities, but the timing and structure too often leave those opportunities unrealized. The defense makes a critical stop, only to return to the field moments later after another offensive mistake.
There are individual efforts worth celebrating, but the collective rhythm that makes those efforts meaningful has too often been absent.
Afterward, Evan Stewart spoke about a team becoming too focused on outcomes rather than the details and relationships that ultimately produce them. I found myself thinking about that observation long after the postgame interviews ended, because it seemed to describe something larger than the difference between winning and losing a football game.
Connection is not simply a word that belongs on a locker room wall or a concept that sounds good during an August press conference. It is something created through countless small acts of trust, accountability and shared experience. It is knowing that someone else will do their job because they believe in you enough to expect you to do yours. It is the willingness to remain committed when circumstances become difficult, when expectations are not being met and when the easiest response would be to retreat into individual frustration.
When that connection is strong, people can endure circumstances that might otherwise overwhelm them.
When it begins to weaken, even extraordinary individual talent can struggle to accomplish ordinary things.
That is not an indictment of the players’ relationships or a claim that I know what happens inside Oregon’s locker room. I don’t. But Saturday’s performance raised legitimate questions about how effectively the connection this program talks about is translating into what happens on the field.
And as I thought about those questions, I found myself returning once again to Victor.
Nearly 40 years of friendship had taught me that connection is rarely about grand gestures. It is built in ordinary conversations, shared frustrations, laughter that becomes funnier with time and the knowledge that someone remains part of your life even when weeks or months pass without seeing them.
It is also something we sometimes take for granted because its presence has become so familiar.
Until suddenly it isn’t.
What We Carry Forward
I have no intention of turning this into a sermon about how everyone should live their life. There are people who find fulfillment in quiet mornings, travel, retirement and freedom from the responsibilities that occupied their working years. I hope they enjoy every moment of it, just as I hope to find time for more of those experiences myself.
But I also hope I never lose the desire to create something, to learn something or to form another connection that might become meaningful in ways I cannot yet imagine.
Victor’s death has reminded me that our time is finite, but it has also reminded me how much of a life can remain present after that life has ended. It lives in the people who carry our stories, the lessons we pass along without realizing we are teaching them and the relationships that continue because someone cared enough to build them.
Seeing his niece at the tailgate Saturday brought that home in a way nothing else could have. I had known her since she was nine, had watched the years pass and had come to regard her as part of my own family. On a day when I was trying to make sense of losing someone who had occupied nearly four decades of my life, her presence reminded me that the connections Victor helped create had not disappeared with him.
There was comfort in that, even as the sadness remained.
I think that is ultimately what I have been searching for during these past several months, even when I did not have the words to describe it. Better health matters because I want more time. Writing matters because I want to make something meaningful with that time. Friendship matters because I don’t want those years to become a collection of accomplishments remembered by someone who has forgotten the importance of sharing them.
And football, for all its frustrations and imperfections, remains one of the places where those connections continue to find me.
I went to Autzen Stadium Saturday carrying grief that had nothing to do with the game. I watched Oregon lose a football contest it should have been capable of winning, and I spent much of the afternoon frustrated by a team that seems to be struggling to find the collective identity necessary to fulfill its potential.
But I also saw someone I have loved like family since she was a little girl, someone whose presence connected me to a man I will miss for the rest of my life. And when I look back on that Saturday years from now, I suspect that is what I will remember most clearly.
Not the seven turnovers. Not the failed conversion. Not even the final score.
I will remember that someone showed up.
Perhaps that is the simplest expression of everything I have been trying to understand. We cannot stop time, prevent every loss or promise ourselves that tomorrow will provide another opportunity to say the things we meant to say today. We cannot make every connection last forever, and we cannot protect the people we love from every painful thing life eventually brings.
What we can do is keep showing up for one another. We can keep creating, keep reaching out, keep doing the difficult work of building something that matters and keep refusing to let the inevitable passage of time turn us into spectators of our own lives.
That is what Victor did for so many people, and it is part of what I hope to carry forward from the years I was fortunate enough to know him.
I don’t know how many more trips around the sun I have left. None of us does. But I know I am not finished writing, learning, loving, building or finding reasons to care deeply about things that might appear insignificant to someone watching from the outside.
There is still work to do, still a world worth being curious about and still a great many people worth showing up for.
And as long as I have the strength to keep moving forward, I intend to keep raging against the dying of the light.
Not because I expect to defeat it, but because I refuse to let it decide how brightly I live while I am still here.