“I hide in the back,” the Wizards point guard said last week. “I don’t want to be there. I don’t speak.”

But when Damiyah Telemaque-Nelson passed away a few weeks shy of her sixth birthday last winter, Wall spoke. Miyah’s mother had told Wall she could set up a private viewing for him, but he declined. He went to New Macedonia Baptist Church in Southeast with his sister and Wizards community relations director Sashia Jones, and he went to the front of the room, and he cried on the stand — “Hell yeah it was hard,” he said. Why? He wanted to show the family that his relationship with Miyah was real, and that it wasn’t going to end.

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So when Miyah’s family and friends walk in Saturday’s Light The Night Walk, a fundraising event benefiting The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, their team will be sponsored by Wall. His name will be on the event’s youth zone, and he made an additional five-figure gift toward non-Hodgkin lymphoma research. (Miyah had Burkitt’s lymphoma, a rare and aggressive form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.)

Like most high-profile athletes, Wall meets countless kids with countless stories. Typically, these relationships last a day. But something clicked when he met Miyah — whom he then helped introduce to Nicki Minaj through a social-media campaign — and it became more than a photo-op.

Wall chatted with Miyah on FaceTime during her extended stays at Children’s National Medical Center. (Her mom later told him that Miyah asked to speak with him just about every day, and he regrets not calling more often.) She played with his nieces and nephews during her trips to Verizon Center for Wizards games. Wall and his sister continue to exchange text messages with Miyah’s mom, and he has promoted the LLS walk virtually daily on his Twitter account this month.

“When you care for somebody and the bond just hits, you can’t really control it,” he explained after practice last week. “I didn’t want it to be like ‘All right, she’s gone, I don’t want to deal with this family [anymore],’ because it was bigger than that. … I wanted to still be a part of that family.”

Miyah’s mother, Kadisha Telemaque, considers herself “a very private individual,” and was hesitant to speak about Wall’s relationship with her daughter, even after his tearful postgame interview about Miyah went viral shortly after she died. Their bond, she thought, spoke for itself.

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“I don’t want anything to turn it from what it was, because he is just my daughter’s buddy, and a man that gave her hope with everything he did for her,” she said. “My daughter truly does have a genuine love for him. I know that she still does, and he does too. And I really wanted to keep it that way.”

Wall’s gift, though, had particular resonance. Miyah had asked her family to participate in last year’s Light the Night walk, because she was captivated by the images of glowing lanterns used at the event. Her final relapse came shortly before the walk, and she wasn’t permitted to leave the hospital. She asked her mom not to do the walk without her, so the planned group outing never happened. This year, they decided, they would walk in Miyah’s honor.

And Telemaque embraces the way Wall has prompted people to remember her daughter. It also allows her to explain how Miyah was more than a cancer patient. The 5-year-old would hold fashion shows in the hospital’s corridor in the middle of the night. She always asked for a room at the front of the ward, where she could interact with everyone coming down the hall. She was fascinated with modeling, and often told her mom she was going to be on television one day. Her relationship with Wall, her mom believes, helped elevate Miyah into a face of her disease.

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“As a mother, I’m grateful for the publicity that she’s gotten from him, because it didn’t just shine a light on her; it shined a light on her diagnosis that a lot of people didn’t know of,” Telemaque said. “And it’s not just promoting a buddy anymore; he’s taking it a step further to now helping other people.”

Telemaque, like others who watched Wall hang out with Miyah, talks about how naturally they interacted, the often-reserved millionaire athlete and the little girl who loved posing for cameras. Wall, Telemaque said, “wasn’t the 25-year-old that he is; he was a kid when he was with her.”

But Wall said meeting Miyah also had a maturing effect on his life, made him think about what it would be like to have a younger sibling or child fighting for her life. He cursed softly in admiration when discussing the girl’s approach to her condition.

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“I couldn’t believe she was that strong and powerful,” he said. “You don’t see a 5- or 6-year old speak like this and have so much confidence when you’ve got all these cords tied to you and you know you can die at any minute.”

The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society asked about crafting a news release to promote Wall’s donation; he declined, because “I just want it to be my family going to support her family.” (He spoke for this story only after my request.) He can’t attend Saturday’s walk because of a preseason game in Milwaukee, but representatives of the Wizards and the John Wall Family Foundation will join Miyah’s family for the event.

Telemaque, of course, appreciates Wall’s donation, because cancer research groups “don’t run off of fuel, and they do run off of money,” she said. His gift, though, reminded her again of what she thought at her daughter’s memorial service.