LAHAINA, Hawaii — Ryan Mikesell won’t say exactly where he was or exactly what he saw that night because he doesn’t want this to be about him. His teammates, a medley of talents from here and there and everywhere, don’t want this to be about them, either. Anthony Grant wasn’t able to find time to sit down for an interview. He certainly doesn’t want this to be about him.



Don’t look here, they say.



Look there.



This is about Dayton, Ohio.



It is, as you know, a town of old tropes. Midwest. Rust Belt. Post-industrial. Urban-rural. Shrinking population. In a 2018 study on Dayton as a struggling city that “reveals the chasm among American cities,” PBS’s Frontline noted that a series of unexplained deaths that year in “a formerly middle-class neighborhood” all combined to “capture three of the city’s pathologies — violence, drug abuse and abandonment — inside an...