The best sports story in West Virginia in 2016 didn't come from one player or coach or team or town. It was born from tragedy. Yet, in the end, it showed the love, compassion and devotion to West Virginians by West Virginians that can make this state so special.
In June, rains sent flood waters surging through several West Virginia areas. Destruction could be seen in Kanawha, Greenbrier, Nicholas and Clay counties. Lives, homes and schools were lost.
In times of strife, many turn to sports for solace. They embrace sports as an escape from the terrible or a return to some sense of normalcy. In many of those flood-damaged areas, though, a return to those sports was put in jeopardy.
The waters that shuttered schools also ruined uniforms, equipment and playing fields. Players and coaches were left to rebuild from next to nothing. All high school athletes wanted to know was if there would be a football season or a soccer season.
In those dark times, the people of and from West Virginia banded together to offer whatever help they could.
Clarksburg native and Florida State head football coach Jimbo Fisher started collecting donated equipment to send back to West Virginia. So did Fairmont native and Alabama head football coach Nick Saban. In July, Fisher, FSU assistant Rick Trickett and Alabama assistant Joe Pendry - West Virginia natives, all of them - came to Clay County to distribute that football equipment to teams affected by the floods.
"I couldn't imagine not having high school athletics," Fisher said to those assembled that day. "I don't want any of y'all to miss, and we don't want ... anybody up here doesn't want any of y'all to miss the opportunities you have."
Marshall University - athletic director Mike Hamrick is a Herbert Hoover High graduate - sent a football equipment truck to Elkview filled with supplies that football players and coaches passed out. West Virginia University football players and coaches loaded up trucks with thousands of bottles of water and food to take to flood-stricken areas.
Help didn't just come from high-profile sources. High school programs throughout West Virginia offered equipment and practice sites to flood-affected teams. They raised money to supply new uniforms for the teams who were rivals on the field, but fellow West Virginians away from it. The list of helpers from around the Kanawha Valley and the rest of the state was voluminous, too many to name without missing someone whose contributions were crucial to the effort.
Any time someone mentioned to me an act of kindness they performed for one of those teams, I thanked them.
"You don't know how much that meant to those folks," I said.
I knew.
My wife is an English teacher at Herbert Hoover High School. Nearly seven feet of floodwater wrecked her first-floor classroom. We went to Hoover's campus shortly after the waters had receded. As we walked through the grass, our footsteps pushed water to the surface like a squeezed sponge. Elsewhere, mud caked the soles of our shoes and climbed up to our ankles.
The flood picked up my wife's desks and cabinets and dumped them in to the middle of her room. Textbooks, lesson plans, wall posters, pictures of the kids, all gone. All that could be salvaged was what hung or was stacked above the flood line.
There's a plastic wall clock sitting on a shelf in our garage. That was all that my wife was able to recover. It will hang in her portable classroom once it's built.
We saw what it did to the Huskies' baseball and softball fields and their football fieldhouse. We saw coaches and players wonder what was next.
But with the help of people all over the Kanawha Valley and West Virginia, those kids opened the fall sports season. The football team took the Joe Eddie Cowley Stadium field at the start of September with feelings of relief and comfort, able to return to its home turf after a month of practicing elsewhere.
I watched fans erupt on the opening kickoff of Hoover's first home game - played as scheduled and without postponement - as Colten Rollyson took it back for a touchdown against Nitro.
Those kids and those coaches have needed plenty of help for those memories to happen this year. West Virginians - those who live here and those born here now living elsewhere - did not let them down. Above any individual victory or achievement, that was the best thing to happen in West Virginia sports this year.
Rather than a crowning moment in sports, it was a crowning moment in sportsmanship.
Contact Derek Redd at 304-348-1712 or derek.redd@wvgazettemail.com. Follow him on Twitter @derekredd.