It’s 1999, and I’m at the Alamodome before a Spurs game. I plan to work the locker room, filling my notebook, before heading home before the tip. I bring my 6-year-old daughter with me.

We circle the floor, talking, before I park her in a chair outside the door to the Spurs locker room. A security guard I know says he will look out for her. The players pass by on their way to and from the floor, and there she sits in their path, anonymous, but arguably the cutest little girl the world has known.

When I get what I need, we leave. And on the way home, I ask if any of the Spurs had stopped to talk to her.

The list of candidates is long. A group that includes David Robinson, Steve Kerr, Sean Elliott, Avery Johnson and Malik Rose is as friendly as it is talented.

She says one stopped.

Tim Duncan.

I once planned to use the anecdote to talk about Duncan, and how the least outgoing in public had a sweet side long before he himself became a father.

But, today, this memory works better in another way.

This is my last column for the Express-News. For those who wish this day had come about, oh, 30 years earlier, understand I never planned it this way.

I arrived in San Antonio in October of 1982 expecting to wow the world of journalism and move on to chase bigger stories in bigger cities. Things changed. Or, to paraphrase the John Lennon lyric, life is what happens to you while you’re busy trying to make deadline.

I can’t remember many of the thousands of words I’ve written, but the memories stay with me. From driving a rental through Spain on the way to a Ryder Cup, to looking out the window of a cab, in the rain of an early morning in Beijing, a deserted Forbidden City as the backdrop, the profession has taken me places. Another anecdote speaks to that.

It’s 1979, and I’m sitting courtside in the old Boston Garden, pecking at a Royal typewriter, consumed by my first full-time job in journalism. I’m covering the Celtics for the Boston Herald.

A rookie named Larry Bird is proving he might have a future. Bob Ryan, a Boston Globe beat writer then and my competition, sat next to me. Ryan viewed basketball as art, and he loathed the years he had been forced to endure waiting on the next Celtics savior.

So that night, after one particularly entertaining play by Bird, Ryan turned to the novice from Texas who had stumbled into history. “You don’t deserve this,” he snapped at me.

Ryan, who became a lifelong friend, wasn’t wrong then. Or now.

The Spurs hit two lotteries. I hit one when I landed here. Even the lows worked out.

I wrote 10 years for the San Antonio Light until, while at the Super Bowl in 1993, the newspaper ceased publishing. My sportswriting friends took me out for a meal in Los Angeles that night as a parting gift. The next morning, the phone in my hotel room rang.

“Would you like to move over to the Express-News?” a Hearst executive asked.

The next day I was again writing at the Super Bowl, but for another newspaper.

I didn’t deserve any of it. Not the opportunity, not the freedom, not the timing. In a newspaper boom period, I covered Super Bowls and Rose Bowls, Masters and Final Fours, the World Series and the Olympics. From Troon to Tuscaloosa, from Sydney to South Texas, my bosses sent me where the stories were.

Along the way, I saw Jack Nicklaus win his last major and Tiger Woods his first. I played golf with George Gervin and Pop-a-Shot with Dennis Rodman.

I interviewed Robinson while he wore a caddie’s white jumpsuit at the Masters, and I interviewed Alvin Robertson while he wore another kind of white uniform in prison. I sparred with the Gunslingers; had arguments with the Ayalas; and went one-on-one in a playful column war with Frank Brickowski that inspired a newsstand placard.

I was caught in an earthquake at a World Series, and I felt the ground move in the final 28.2 seconds of a Game Six in Miami. I was there, on Memorial Day, when Elliott performed a miracle, and I was there, in Detroit, when Robert Horry performed like Robert Horry.

Sometimes the stories had nothing to do with sports. Another anecdote:

It’s 1998, and my wife and I are getting away together for the first time since our daughter had been born. This is a big deal. We are flying to New York for the NBA All-Star Game, and we have theater tickets for that night.

Gregg Popovich and his wife, Erin, happen to be on our plane. All of us groan when the flight is delayed, and we groan again when the flight is rerouted to JFK. The theater is looking dicey.

When we walk out of the airport there is madness, with just a few cabs and a hundred people chasing them. As I search for a way out, Popovich takes off in another direction, wading into the crowd with his personality in full force, until he comes back with a driver who had no choice but to follow him. Popovich waves us over, and the four of us pile into the cab. The coach known for barking at the media insists we should be dropped off first — to make the show.

Popovich helped make that deadline for me, but I faced thousands of others on my own. There was anxiety, but there was always the same feeling I had when I first walked into a big-city news room in 1971 as an intern at the Dallas Morning News. I knew immediately that this was my business and my kind of people.

At some point the pursuit of a larger stage faded. Maybe, to use one of Popovich’s favorite lines, I got over myself. And as I grew up, San Antonio did, too.

When I arrived a third of a century ago, the place was charming, but it had been bypassed by sports. My hometown of Dallas was major league. San Antonio had high school football, some small colleges and one, withering pro franchise.

Gervin was still winning scoring titles then. But as good as he was, the crowds were getting smaller, and the Spurs were trending downward. The franchise’s existence in South Texas was in doubt.

What followed was a series of events, each needing the other — from the Robinson lottery, to the Alamodome, to the Duncan lottery, to a championship, to the AT&T Center.

You want something to write about? Try six trips to the NBA Finals.

There was more. The Alamodome produced Final Fours and bowl games and conference championships and NFL games and championship fights. And when the Texas Open moved back to the spring, and UTSA began playing Division I football, and the AT&T Center prospered … San Antonio looked nothing like it did when I first came here.

The personalities were as vibrant. Shaquille O’Neal began as a teenage showman at Fort Sam. Red McCombs was ever available and ever opinionated. Manu Ginobili remained gracious in multiple settings and multiple languages. And Popovich, always wading into the crowd, was as fascinating when angry as he was when reflective.

Then there were those who were mostly unknown before I wrote about them, and whose stories might have been better than anyone’s: From a basketball phenom at St. Anthony, to a Ryder Cup caddie who had sold medical supplies in San Antonio, to a world-ranked triathlete who home-schooled her five children.

I leave the Express-News wishing, at times, I could do it all over again. We all have our best years. Mine surely included a 6 year old.

But we’re always in transition. And just as my daughter has grown to be an adult, and Duncan has given way to another version of the Spurs, I have entered the next stage of my life. San Antonio is still changing, becoming a bigger city with bigger stories, and now it is time for others at the newspaper to tell them.

buckh@satx.rr.com

Twitter: @Buck_SA