Do not feel this pain. Not days when a champion is out there in front of his roaring true believers, his black No. 3 as familiar as their own birthdays. And then suddenly he is into a wall at 180 miles an hour and an ambulance is there to take him away, already beyond help and hope. It is the very swiftness of fate in auto racing that can leave even those of us who rarely watch aghast. In the NFL, they talk of sudden death.
Auto racing knows.
Maybe Sunday night as well as it ever has. Dale Earnhardt Sr. died in great irony. And not just teammates, of course. One of them a friend, Michael Waltrip, the winner who had worked a career for this day, and now will want to forget it for the rest of his life. Dale Earnhardt Jr. finished second in the Daytona 500 Sunday.