Here is what I remember about my meeting with Colin McGowan the week before Thanksgiving 2014. It was still daylight when I google-mapped my way through Chicago to the address he gave me where I parked on the street, sent a text, and nervously waited on the sidewalk. And when he emerged from his building, I was astonished that he’d ever agreed to meet. Twenty-four at the time, a brilliant writer yes, but also a kid – if David Roth was younger in person, then Colin was exponentially so. I immediately down-shifted into what my own children call BME (Big Mom Energy) in an attempt to be a less weird version of “Middle-aged Stranger from the Internet,” and while I have no idea whether it worked, he hung in there with me nonetheless.

We walked to the restaurant – I think it was Mexican – chatting awkwardly on the way. I hadn’t started recording yet, but various “thank-yous” interrupt the conversation once we arrived, as the server brought food and drinks. Like nearly every other participant, he openly shared stories about his personal life, but mostly we talked about Twitter, sports, and writing – the subjects that had connected us in the first place.  SB Nation’s closure was top of mind, but also the demise of other sites where his work had been featured, and when I replayed the recording this week and heard him say, “Everyone’s just throwing shit against the wall because no one knows how to monetize the Internet,” I wanted to time travel back and offer a high five. Young Colin already understood that whatever artistry we offered to this ravenous beast would never be enough to fill it.

I think this is why I asked him whether he’d ever considered writing fiction, given how finely woven his work was, not precious, just so thoughtfully crafted and vivid that I felt it deserved a longer life, and he said that despite an undergraduate and a Masters degree in English, it wasn’t something he’d attempted.

Well, you’ve somehow managed to make European soccer and the NBA – two subjects about which I dgaf – interesting enough for me to read,” I said, “so maybe you should consider it.

And while there was further conversation, revealing him to be far more self-aware than anyone you’d call a kid, that’s about all the distillation that seems fair ten years later. He was gracious and funny, kinder than he had any need to be, but the years between 24 and 34 are a decade of evolution, and stories so long past should be ours alone to tell. Yet there is a gift which comes from writing with delay, tracing the map in reverse as you recall watching someone grow into a fully-fledged adult.

Problematic men are everywhere these days and hot damn they are especially on Twitter, but one reason for the optimism I continue to have about the world, is that good ones are proliferating as well; they’re just far less noisy. In the past ten years, Colin McGowan has continued to write about sports, but he has also written frankly and with deep vulnerability about his own life—mental health, work, love, friendship, and art. Less monologue than an invitation to conversation, such work is a balm for the toxicity that pervades, and a reminder that we aren’t alone. His most recent essay, at a new site called Flaming Hydra (Maybe the secret to monetizing the Internet is paying people—you should join!) brought me to tears with its beauty and humanity.

If, as Tennessee Williams asserted, “Time is the longest distance between two places,” there are hours and days and miles of road and life and change between the two people who met that November day in Chicago and the two, now ten years apart this May afternoon. It’s not the trip I thought we’d take but the view was worth it.