Legacy

 They drop the green down in Daytona again tomorrow, and here in Indiana all is arctic fastness. Piles of snow flank the driveway. It forms white ice cream cones on the stacked chairs on the back deck. And the footprints leading across the backyard have almost filled in from the fresh snow that descends almost daily now from a sky the color of slate.

Winter holds court, in other words. You could hardly expect otherwise on the weekend of Valentine's Day.

But tomorrow there will be a rumble and blare from Florida, and that freight train of American and Japanese muscle will sweep around Daytona's 31-degree banking like a squadron of jets, and it will be a movie trailer for summer. The first robin of spring, only louder and faster and crazier.

I don't know why, but all of that feels different to me this time. Maybe it's because the page that has been turning for a few years now has finally turned for good. Some of the old names are still around, but the grid is stuffed with another generation: Alex Bowman and William Byron and Aric Almirola and Austin Dillon; Christopher Bell and Bubba Wallace and Ryan Preece.

And, of course, Chase Elliott, your defending Cup champion and First Prince of all the sport's young princes.

So odd, running your finger down the grid and seeing the Bells and Preeces and Byrons and Cole Custers. And so odd, realizing it's been 20 years now since the patriarch of all of this nosed almost delicately into the wall on Daytona's last lap, and never drew another breath.

Dale Earnhardt died two decades ago this weekend, and still I see that trademark smirk, and the glint in the eye that accompanied it. It was his standard greeting for all of us media creatures, and it made him look for all the world like he was putting one over on us and knew it. Like all of this was a huge prank, and we were the last ones in on the joke.

And then the tail of Earnhardt's black No. 3 wiggled as he entered turn three on that last lap, and he slewed up the track, and Sterling Marlin turned him just so, and a fraction of a second later he went into the wall at that fateful angle. 

And he was gone. Dead of a basal skull fracture, because by God he was Dale Earnhardt, and he wasn't going to wear that newfangled HANS device a handful of drivers were already trying out.

But because he didn't, head-and-neck restraints have been standard issue for NASCAR drivers since. And because of that, the most horrific-looking crashes -- like Ryan Newman's a year ago at Daytona -- do not end with TV announcers speaking in hushed tones and ambulances making their leisurely way to the hospital with the lights and siren off.

All of that happened 20 years ago this weekend, and to this day I can still see it. Earnhardt's crumpled car sitting motionless in the infield, and Ken Schrader, the first person to reach it, peering inside and then frantically motioning for help. Darrell Waltrip up in the booth, saying "Hope Dale's OK" in a tone that indicated he knew Dale wasn't.

And, finally, an aerial shot of the ambulance, slowly driving away from the track with its lights dark and its siren silent.

You pretty much knew then, long before Mike Helton made the official announcement.  And 20 years later?

Twenty years later, Ryan Newman starts the Daytona 500 from the inside of the fourth row, a year after he walked out of the hospital under his own steam, holding hands with his two girls, two days after what surely seemed a fatal accident.  

Twenty years later, that is Dale Earnhardt's gift to the sport that killed him.