KANSAS CITY, Mo. - On Monday, the Rangers sent Jose Trevino back to the minor leagues, seemingly bringing to a close the most eventful week of his life.

The closure, though, actually came Sunday evening.

It had not been a week, but six painful years in the making. It had been that long since he heard his father, Joe "Buge" Trevino, tell him: "You make me so proud. I love you man." They were the last words the father spoke to the son.

Trevino had just given a TV interview in which he started to choke up trying to relate what it meant to deliver the walkoff hit in Sunday's 13-12 win over Colorado on Father's Day, seven days after becoming a father and less than 72 hours after what was supposed to be a 12-hour major league callup.

"I don't think anybody who saw that really knew what it meant to me," Trevino said Monday, while waiting for a flight to take him back to Frisco and his baby. "It felt like such a weight off my shoulders."

In a tunnel behind the dugout, Trevino sat with the two people who know best what it meant - his mother and girlfriend. He held his newborn son, Josiah Cruz, sank against a cinder block wall and started to wail.

"He cried so much," his mother Patsy said Monday. "I think it was a mixture of everything, the emotions of becoming a father, of having that hit and of missing his father."

The obituary said Joe Trevino died in October, 2013 at the age of 60 of a "long illness."

It doesn't begin to tell the story.

Some 18 months earlier, Patsy, a school cafeteria manager, and Joe, who worked at the Corpus Christi Army Dept., had made the drive up from Alice, Texas to Waco to watch Jose, the youngest of their four children by five years, begin his college career with Oral Roberts.

It was a cool and misty February Friday. Trevino didn't play great at third base, but did get his first college hit against Baylor. The next day it rained hard, forcing the cancellation of the game. Joe, who had recently gotten over a bout of pneumonia, started to cough up blood while the couple was out shopping. Overnight, he asked to be admitted to a hospital. The diagnosis: Pneumonia in both lungs.

Joe Trevino insisted his wife attend the rescheduled doubleheader on Sunday. Jose offered to stay behind with his mother and not return Tulsa, but everybody insisted things would be OK and that he needed to be in school.

His dad told him: "I'm so proud of you. I love you man."

Things were not OK.

As the night wore on, Joe's breathing became more labored. The situation became dire. Joe eventually went into cardiac arrest. Though he was resuscitated, he was comatose. He never regained consciousness, spending 18 months in nursing homes. Jose wouldn't get a chance to come home for nearly four months to see him due to baseball season.

On more than one occasion, Jose decided to quit baseball and return to Alice, get a job in an oil field and help his mother. You need to stay, she would tell him; your father would want that.

"When I finally got a chance to see him, my high school coach was there," Trevino said. "He told me to talk to him, that he'd hear me. I kind of took it all in. I said: 'I'm going to keep making you proud dad.'"

It was the last thing he said to him before the coffin was closed, too.

Trevino said the situation made him the kind of guy "who didn't need any extra motivation." He and his father had shared a dream of dramatic big league hits. He'd get those. His father had reminded him to never forget where he'd come from and those who helped him along the way. And when teammates needed reminding of that, Jose wasn't afraid to share his father's words.

In 2015, he'd shared them - and the story of his dad - with a teammate at Class A Hickory, an infielder who wasn't playing much at the time and who thought he was being overlooked. The teammate: Isiah Kiner-Falefa.

On Sunday, it was Kiner-Falefa, who scored from second on Trevino's bloop hit. As soon as he crossed the plate with the game-winning run, Kiner-Falefa slammed his helmet down and didn't leap into a dog pile but went straight to first base to hug Trevino.

"I really, really wanted to make that happen for him," Kiner-Falefa said. "I'm not sure I can explain what it meant to him, but I know how much it meant to him."

It meant keeping a long-held promise to his dad.

And it meant closure.

Twitter: @Evan_P_Grant