One by one they came to him, after he stopped the car and climbed the fence as of old. After he climbed down and knelt on the wall and wept and rose again, mock-conducting the roar from the fans with a wave of his arms, the roar that waterfalled down on him from 135,000 souls that sounded more like half-a-million.
They came to him, as Helio Castroneves got down off the wall and jogged the wrong way down the track, and the fans -- God bless the fans -- kept making their sound. As he celebrated like no Indianapolis 500 winner has ever celebrated, because how many times in 110 years does a man achieve this sort of milestone?
That's an easy one: Four times. Four times a man has won the 500 for the fourth time. And the last time it happened was 30 years ago.
And so Helio jogged and cried and waved his arms, and now here they came. And it was not just his race team and his team owners, Mike Shank and Jim Meyer.
It was everyone.
Here came Will Power, his old teammate from Penske Racing. Here came the rest of the Penske guys. Here came Juan Pablo Montoya -- Helio actually leapt into his arms -- and Simon Pagenaud and Conor Daly, and now at last true royalty.
Mario Andretti.
Who leaned over the pit wall to congratulate him. And when Helio dipped his head before this Indy prince, Mario kissed it.
There may have been more popular winners at Indianapolis. No, scratch that. There haven't been.
This was Dale Earnhardt finally winning Daytona in 1999, every crew member of every team lining up to congratulate him as he rolled slowly toward Victory Lane. Like Earnhardt, like Mario, Helio is a prince himself at Indy, and was long before Sunday afternoon, when he joined A.J. Foyt, Al Unser Sr. and Rick Mears as four-time winners a dozen years after winning his third.
That owes more than just to his absurd skill, understand. It also owes much to the man himself, so endlessly cheerful and engaging and accommodating that he has become not just respected by fans and rivals, but beloved.
And it was one hell of a show he and his 32 friends put on Sunday.
It was billed as the kids vs. the old hands, and the kids lived up to the billing. Twenty-one-year-old Colton Herta went to the front on the very first lap. Twenty-year-old Rinus VeeKay led three times for 32 laps. Twenty-two-year-old Pato O'Ward led 17 laps. And Alex Palou, 24, led 35 laps and turned it into a duel to the checkers with Helio in the closing laps.
Five times in the last 50 laps they swapped the lead, the last time on Lap 199, when Helio swept around the young Spaniard on the outside three laps after Palou swept around him.
And that was that. No way on God's earth was the old hand going to give the kid another opening.
Thus, again, 2021 remains the Year of Geezer Revenge, the 46-year-old Castroneves joining 43-year-old Tom Brady and 50-year-old Phil Mickelson on the top step of the podium. That he did it for a rookie racing team in its very first IndyCar start -- after 10 fruitless years of chasing No. 4 for Penske -- only gave the storyline a bit more shine.
Not that it needed any, of course. Not that any Indy 500 in memory ever shone brighter as it was.
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