The vanishing, continued

This year, man. This sorry, benighted, black-hearted scourge of a year.

Paul Hornung, now? Really, 2020?

A calendar year cannot hate, but rationality flees the room when it takes the Golden Boy and Gale Sayers and Don Shula and Tom "Mr. 63-Yard Field Goal" Dempsey, and Jim Kiick and Willie Wood and Pat Dye and Johnny Majors and a bunch of others I'm probably forgetting.

And that's just football. That's just one corner of one segment of one certain generation's memories, vanishing in dribs and drabs until this lousy son-of-a-biscuit 2020.

Now it's a flood tide, and so, yeah, add Kobe and John Thompson and Eddie Sutton and Curley Neal, and Tom Seaver and Bob Gibson and Lou Brock and Al Kaline, too. Add  Chadwick Boseman, even, who wasn't Jackie Robinson but played him in the movies.

On and on and on. And so pardon me if I shake my fist and yell at the clouds, because with every death rationality slips a little further away, and mortality digs its sharp elbow a little deeper into my ribs.  

Yes, I know a calendar year cannot hate, but 2020 hates those of us of a certain age anyway. I'm convinced of it. It hates the athletes and coaches we grew up watching. It hates the Sports Illustrated covers with which we used to paper our bedroom walls. It hates our childhoods, dammit, and so it's determined to make them vanish, piece by piece.

I know, I know. This is just life. People grow old, and their minds and bodies betray them, and they die. And that's all that's happening here, because the generation of athletes who brought joy and richness to our youth is well into that aforementioned process. 

So maybe the vanishing is no more pronounced this year than any other. Maybe it only seems so, because this year has been particularly bizarre and twisted and sometimes bug-eyed insane.

And now it's taken Paul Hornung, and there goes another piece of childhood. There goes a particular Thanksgiving when snow coated the grass in a thin wet skein of white, and my uncle and cousin and I went out into the barnyard to skid around in it.

We had a football, and one of us was Bart Starr, and one of us was Boyd Dowler. The other, of course, was Paul Hornung -- No. 5, Notre Dame icon, business end of the fabled Green Bay Packer sweep.

We ran it over and over that day, slipping, sliding, falling, pretending Jerry Kramer and Fuzzy Thurston were out there leading the way for us. And now Paul Hornung runs it forever in some world far better than this.

See ya, No. 5.

And bite me, 2020.