“Baseball is not life and death. But in life and death, we remember the game, and we remember those who shared the game with us.” -Jeff Zillgitt, A Childhood Memory

Be it the game’s persistence — a constant, onward push of an army of steamrollers — or its spiritual church-like aura, baseball is a connector. For many, it is the connector. Box scores speak languages that perk ears crossing generations, linking centuries and intertwining lives.

The above quote speaks to our nature as humans, of being and having been, turning breaths into moments, moments into memories and memories into life. Life is, after all, just the collective ensemble of so many memories, the times that describe who you are, or who you once were.

For many, there is no better way to record those breaths, bookmark those moments, share those memories and validate the passage of time than through baseball. I count myself as one of those many.

It’s not just box scores that communicate with us. It’s often the men behind the digits and data points, the players donning the color-coordinated laundry with whom we connect. And when tragedy strikes, when death steals away the breath from those we followed, those we looked up to as more than the player of a child’s game, we remember the game and the people who shared it with us.

The early 2010s elevated Philadelphia to an ethereal mecca of pitching. For a few short years, the city felt like the center of the baseball world. To an impressionable, baseball-loving teenager — a pitcher nonetheless — in Philadelphia’s immediate suburbs, it felt like the center of the entire world.

So on October 6, 2010, a day Roy Halladay forced into his life, on a mound he had stood atop just 15 times before wearing red Phillies pinstripes, 46,408 fans, plus one charmed teenager, his father and his younger sister brandished rally towels, hooted and hollered, and took in what none in either of their generations had ever witnessed.

From the most beautiful damn game I've ever seen pitched. I'll never forget the no-hitter, and sharing it with my father and sister. pic.twitter.com/sfLI3CMGZo — Ben Harris (@byBenHarris) November 7, 2017

Halladay had never before graced the postseason with his precision and elegance — he wouldn’t have stood on that mound had he not asked for a ticket out of Toronto, the organization that drafted him, that chiseled him into the model of physical and mental consistency that would spin the second no-hitter in postseason history that night. The achievement was no more befitting a man of his caliber, on and off the field, than his untimely death Tuesday was jarring and incomprehensible.

Halladay died off the coast of Florida when his single-engine plane crashed into the Gulf of Mexico. A man with a career defined by complete, 100 percent control, a life ended due to the terrifying absence of the very same thing.

Everyone wanted to deem the 2011 Phillies pitching staff the “Four Aces,” yet Halladay refused to let Joe Blanton be left out. That staff, now dispersed across the country — half still pitching, half not — has lost an ace. Now technically a full deck of four aces feels anything but.

I called my dad. Later that night, I received a text from my sister: “Sorry to hear about Roy. I know you really looked up to him :(. That was definitely a game I’ll never forget.”

Roy Halladay delivers during his no-hitter in Game 1 of the 2010 NLDS against the Reds at Citizens Bank Park. (Photo by Chris Trotman/Getty Images)

I had already begun reminiscing about that game, first the growing buzz, the pessimistic determinism that builds as a no-hitter unfolds. It typically persists until the final out. An “I’ll believe it when I see it” attitude. Halladay gave off a different vibe. The disappointing ending never came. The doctor was in.

That hysteria of waving flags and cacophonous cheering was replaced by synchronized gasps just twice through those two and a half hours at Citizens Bank Park as Halladay manhandled the Reds. Twice the entire stadium’s hearts skipped a beat at once. The first came on a full-count, two-out cutter to Reds lefty Jay Bruce that dove below the zone, allowing Bruce to whirl his bat toward the dugout and take off on a brisk jog to first base, where no other Cincinnati Red would stand that game. Bruce had homered off a Halladay cutter that July. Maybe Halladay didn’t want to make the same mistake twice, four-run lead be damned.

The second hush came seconds before the robotic Halladay replaced his merciless, stone-faced facade with a raging smile, a smack of his fist meeting his black Nike mitt and the hug of his catcher.

Oh, that fateful Brandon Phillips dribbler up the first-base line, the final out that cemented history. Phillips, not three steps out of the box, discarded his bat in the direct path of the ball that barely made its way onto the infield grass, forcing Phillies catcher Carlos Ruiz to adjust course and drop to his knees. Just two years before, a Phillies pitcher dropped to his knees not far from where Ruiz knelt. “Chooch” bare-handed the baseball and fired to first, and met his pitcher with a bear hug on the same exact spot where Brad Lidge fell to the ground, arms raised to the heavens, after clinching the Phillies’ first World Series title since 1980. What more fitting a final out than a weakly hit topper induced on a perfect curveball impeded by one final obstacle, a well-placed bat, navigated beautifully by Halladay’s personal commander-in-chief, the man whom he constantly showered with praise. Together, he and Ruiz achieved what just one other battery had in the prior 1,319 postseason baseball games. Halladay was all about “together.”

@richeisen reminded me to look at the watch Roy Halladay gave me after his perfect game. He presented 60 of them to the entire team and staff. I had not had it out of the safe in quite some time. It’s a beautiful and special luxury gift for sure… pic.twitter.com/NXQpveMpK0 — Charlie Manuel (@CMBaseball41) November 8, 2017

Forget the zero hits allowed — no pitcher in baseball in 2017 threw a complete-game shutout with as few pitches, as many strikeouts and as few walks as Halladay did in that playoff debut. 2017 was the first season no such games had been pitched since 1987, 10 years after Halladay was born, 11 more before he’d throw his first big league game. He was an anachronistic relic of a what now may be a bygone era, a reminder of what baseball once was. His death serves as a stark reminder that we may never see the type of pitcher he was again.

Halladay dictated at-bats, games and seasons. He was surgical. He earned the nickname “Doc” because of it, prepared and precise like a surgeon with a scalpel in hand, ready to carve up opposing lineups. It’s a pitcher thing, the act of being in full command. It mirrors the psyche necessary to excel at a skill so fraught with failure, a skill that necessitates the spotlight shining down on you and you alone. The rest of baseball — hitting, fielding, catching — is reactionary. Pitching is not. Standing on the loneliest plot of dirt in the world, there’s no one to back you up, to catch you if you fall, or pick you up when you do. Your only relief is the manager, the one who trusted you to execute, coming to pull you after the damage is done.

It’s no surprise the number of similar accidents resulting in pitchers’ deaths is high — these are men who, even off the mound, crave that taste of control, the rush of adrenaline that comes from standing atop the world and dictating what happens next, regardless of whether it comes 10 inches above the grassy playing surface with a baseball in hand or thousands of feet in the air, hands wrapped around a joystick. To be in control, as Halladay always seemed to be, both physically and emotionally. To defy gravity, whether in a sleek plane blasting through the Florida air or with a curveball and cutter whistling through a domed Toronto night or a darkening Philadelphia evening. In a playoff game he waited his whole life to pitch, he dazzled as only one other man in history ever had, epitomizing control.

He was also a giver. He could control that too. He gave to the game of baseball up until the very end. Four years after he retired, his mechanics, manifested in Astros starter Charlie Morton, propelled Houston to a Game 7 victory and a World Series title less than a week before his death. The day before he died, he spoke with Phillies prospects in Clearwater, Fla. The Pasco County Sheriff, who delivered the news nobody wanted to hear, noted Halladay had donated the funds that started its K9-unit, a gesture repaid by naming the dog Doc.

For the last handful of years, I’ve hung a beautiful piece of art in my room. Philadelphia-area artist Danny Duffy of Philly Word Art painted a word picture, literally. I call it linguistic pointillism, using the pitch-by-pitch and play-by-play information from Halladay’s no-hitter and his perfect game over the Marlins in 2010 to form an image of Halladay with Chooch in the background, his glove asking for a low-and-away curveball as he did identically for the final pitch of both the perfect game and the no-hitter. Of course, Halladay obliged both times. It’s reminiscent of the myriad stories that have come out describing the pitcher, but more importantly, the man that Halladay was. When you peer in close, each holds a piece of the puzzle. When viewed from afar, they comprise a complete, alluring image.

I did not cover Halladay, he told none of this to my own ears. I have no personal stories of him being gracious enough to speak to a family member of mine after that no-hitter, or his insistence on checking my grocery store employee nametag so he could use my first name, or standing atop the mound with him in his final season, his body aching, telling me “everything hurts,” yet refusing to relent and step off the mound. A perennial warrior.

But he affected me nonetheless during his time in Philadelphia, and no time more than during that no-hitter. He gave me a glimpse into the stoic, determined mentality of the man on the mound — a treat, a lesson, a direction for how to hold myself both as a pitcher and as a person. I’d go on to throw a perfect game in high school a year later with a darting two-seamer (what we both used to compensate for a lack of blow-you-away velocity). A most fitting tribute. But I never felt closer to him than that night at the Bank.

The memories of his splendor on the mound that game and the accompanying moments of shared joy and kinship ring true seven years later, just as they will seventy years from now. He was responsible for that moment, that no-hitter that so many in Philadelphia clung to. It is those moments, the ones whose magnitude you can’t comprehend until long after they’re over, that truly define a breath turned moment, a moment turned memory, a memory filed away to revisit over and over again. He made it happen. My trio of family members share an eternal connection because of it.

I didn’t share the no-hitter with Roy Halladay. He shared it with me. He shared it with my father. He shared it with my sister. And my father, my sister and I, we shared it together.

Top photo: Jeff Zelevansky/Getty Images