Throwback heaven

 There are a couple of TVs above the bar in one of our favorite eateries, and on one of them, on this cool Saturday night in May, Brooks Koepka is lashing golf balls through the rain at the PGA tournament, the second major of the year.

On the other is a ghost.

Is that ... is that North Wilkesboro Speedway I see? And the NASCAR boys rumbling around its humble little half-mile of asphalt again?

Sure is.

It's NASCAR, it's North Wilkesboro, and the dead walk, after a quarter century and change. The series, having gotten too big for its britches (and a fair amount of  its past), ran its last race there in April 1996. Last time I saw pictures of the place, it was a literal ghost: Faded Coca-Cola signs and rusting bleachers and sun-bleached asphalt, and nothing but the moaning wind and echoes of long-gone Saturday night features to cut the silence.

Funny thing about the past, though.

You can forget about it -- try to erase it, even -- but like chalk on a summer sidewalk, its imprint remains, growing fainter each time it rains but always there, if only in the mind's eye. It never really leaves you, and sooner or later the time will come when you need it again.

This is that time for NASCAR.

It's still the most popular motorsports series in America, but it's a shadow of what it was 26 years ago when it decided places like North Wilkesboro and Rockingham were too low-rent for it. The sport was a big swaggering money pump then, all puffed up with the sort of delusions money always feeds. By the late '90s, its TV and attendance numbers had convinced even rational people that it had become the nation's fourth (or fifth) major sport.

It never was, of course. What it was, what all motorsport is when you get down to the bare wood of it, was a niche sport riding an enormous bubble. And like all bubbles, it eventually burst.

Not quite two decades later, its No. 2 marquee event, the Brickyard 400, was running in front of vast swatches of empty seats. And it struggled to sell out what had been one of its hottest tickets, the night race at Bristol.

Enter North Wilkesboro.

Enter a bunch of local true believers, Bennie Parsons' widow among them, who saw value in both North Wilkesboro and NASCAR's past, and wouldn't let it die. Eventually the governor of North Carolina got involved, and Dale Earnhardt Jr., and Marcus Smith -- son of Bruton, the man who took NASCAR away from North Wilkesboro and to this day the most hated man in the county.

And now here came Saturday night, and there NASCAR was. Runnin' that humble little tick-over-a-half-mile again.

It's an admission, at least in these quarters, that the sport is willing to embrace the past it once held at arm's length, and not because of some newfound appreciation for it. Because it needs it.

North Wilkesboro, after all, is plunked down in the Carolina mountains, right spang in the middle of what used to be bootlegging country. And it was bootleggers who in a real sense were NASCAR’s midwives, and who sustained it in its early years. The most famous of them, the late Junior Johnson, lived almost literally in  North Wilkesboro’s backyard.

NASCAR used to run away from all that like its hair was on fire. But now?

Now it's running its All-Star race today right in the beating heart of it. And you know what the winner will get?

A trophy shaped like a moonshine still.

The past, come 'round again.