A win for the storyline

Sometimes you get lucky, if you're a sportswriter going hand-to-hand with the deadline demons. The gods of narrative smile. Fate itself, which has bigger fish to fry most of the time, looks down, sees all these poor schmos hunched over their laptops trying to wake up their inner Hemingway, and takes pity.

Then it hands them a day like Sunday, at Homestead, Fla.

Where a rank-and-file scuffler and certified good guy named Martin Truex Jr. ascended to the top of the NASCAR mountain, and, lord, was there some meat on that storyline. Do you go with the fact that four years ago he was out of a job? Do you go with the fact he's stuck by his girlfriend as she's battled cervical cancer? Or do you go with all of that plus the fact that Sunday he won both the race and the NASCAR Cup title for the outlier of all outliers?

Furniture  Row Racing is not Hendricks or Stewart-Haas or Joe Gibbs Racing, the royal houses of NASCAR. They're a bunch of dreamers who operate not out of Charlotte, N.C., like just about everyone else, but out of a nondescript white blockhouse of a building in Denver, Colo. Their race-day crew works out of JGR's complex back in Charlotte. They get their race chassis from Gibbs. And their entire team consists of two drivers, Truex and Erik Jones, a rookie.

Truex, it should be noted, is not a rookie. He's been knocking around NASCAR's big series since 2004, when he was 24. Until 2015, he'd never finished higher than 11th in the points. And of his 15 career wins, 13 have come in the last three years, including eight this year.

Typically, none of those eight wins came easily. Yesterday was a fair microcosm of the whole season: A lot of battling to get the car to work right, a lot of moving around on the track to find a line that worked -- and then, miraculously, finding that line in the late going and leading the last 51 laps.

"I just found a way," Truex said. "I found a lane that I could use and I found a lane that was blocking enough of their air that they couldn't use it and just made it happen. I can't believe it."

Neither, presumably, could all the working stiffs hanging on his words.

See, he may have found his lane and his destiny. But they found their storyline.