When the younger of my two sons finished his second-grade soccer season, having played on our town's B-level travel team, we received a call from the parent-manager of the A team. Based on tryouts, he said, Charly was being offered a promotion. He was good enough, the coaches were saying, to move up.
We were very proud of him, thrilled for him, and then after thinking about it for a day or two, and without so much as consulting him,  said, no thank you.
To say that Charly was undersize for his age was an understatement. He was several inches smaller than the next smallest kid. He was fast, though. And by necessity, more than a little feisty. But in the interests of his little-guy self-esteem, we believed he was better off where he had been, one of the more competitive players at the B level.

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Adrian Wojnarowski was honored Friday night with the Curt Gowdy Award for journalistic excellence by the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. That's an award I received in 2017, which I mention -- aside from being proud to share that distinction with my friend Woj -- only because that same year the Hall finally got around to honoring the great Chicago Bulls' architect Jerry Krause.
Krause had died months earlier of an insidious bone disease. The very next day, this absolute gem of a column, Hall of Fame worthy all on its own, dropped on the Yahoo pages at that time graced by Wojnarowski before his celebrated move to ESPN.