Generation next

Sometimes the page turns right in front of you, and there is nothing figurative about it. You turn on your television, and there is the future staring back at you. You turn on your television, and there is all this unfamiliarity where the familiar used to be.

The Daytona 500 happened yesterday, first herald of spring for a lot of us. It was also something else, and all you had to do was look at the leaderboard to see it.

All these kids, right there at the top. All these kids, deciding what once got decided by Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart and Dale Earnhardt (Sr. and Jr.) -- and even Jimmie Johnson, who's suddenly the old guard of the sport.

There, on Sunday afternoon, was Ryan Blaney, 24, leading 118 laps. Chasing him around at the front of the restrictor-plate freight train were a pile of other 20-somethings: Erik Jones and Joey Logano and Chase Elliott and Trevor Bayne and Austin Dillon and Daniel Suarez -- and also Darrell "Bubba" Wallace Jr., who would make history on a day stuffed with it.

Around all of it, there was this shine of newness -- a new-car smell, if you will -- that reminded you of golf a few years back, when an injury-ravaged Tiger Woods faded into irrelevance and the Rory McIlroys and Rickie Fowlers and Jordan Spieths began taking over the game.

In the end, after the usual Daytona chaos, it was Dillon who won, 27 years old and reaching back to the past to present the future. He won, after all, in that iconic forward-slanting 3, the number made famous by Earnhardt Sr. He won 20 years after Earnhardt put the 3 in Victory Lane in the 500, and 17 years to the day he died there on the last lap. He won with a kid's lucky penny glued to his dash just as Earnhardt had in 1998, and he won with the kind of move that was pure Earnhardt: Punting Almirola out of the way in the green-white-checker when Almirola moved over to block him.

Man had the Daytona 500 to win, same as Almirola did. Each did what he had to do to win it. It was old-school NASCAR, executed by its new face.

Nowhere was that new face more literally obvious than in the car that behind Dillon. Wallace, 24, was driving it. He gave Dillon the shove that got him to Almirola, then outdragged veteran Denny Hamlin to the line to finish second.

Then he broke down and cried in the postrace presser, overwhelmed by the weight of history. This will happen when you're the first African-American to run regularly in the Cup series since Wendell Scott in the 1960s. This will also happen when you finish second at Daytona, the highest finish in the 500 for an African-American driver ever, and the highest finish for an African-American in any NASCAR Cup race since Scott won in Jacksonville, Fla., 55 years ago.

And he, too, reached back to the past to present the future. Hank Aaron called him before the race. Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton, who is also black, tweeted his congratulations. And lest anyone forget, this happened during Black History Month, when everyone reaches back to the past to illustrate how far people of color have come in America, and how much farther there still is to go.

Sometimes the page turns right in front of you. And there is nothing figurative about it.

Sunday afternoon, on a February day brimful with echoes, the page turned. And what it revealed, what it always reveals, was the best part.

Because beyond that page, you could see all the others yet to be turned.