INDIANAPOLIS – Chuck Pagano is coming back to Indianapolis on Thursday, back to where he once lived, where he could have died, because of Cory and Mickey. He’s coming back to the Colts complex on 56th Street, where he had to clear out his office after being fired 16 months ago, because of Kristen and Ryan. His name may be on the sign, but he’s coming back for the annual ChuckStrong Tailgate Gala — he chose to hold it there, at the Colts complex — because this isn’t about him.

It’s about Cory and Mickey, about Kristen and Ryan, about a woman he once visited at the IU Health Simon Cancer Center, a woman he didn’t know, just to say thank you. And to say goodbye.

It’s about one kid he’ll never see again, and another kid he never had the chance to meet. That happened before a football game in 2016. Broke Pagano’s heart, right there in the tunnel at Lucas Oil Stadium, shortly before kickoff. You don’t know that story. Not yet.

Chuck Pagano works for the Chicago Bears but he’s coming back Thursday, back to the Colts, because of the most accurate thing former Colts general manager Ryan Grigson ever said. This was after the 2015 season, after Colts owner Jim Irsay went to 56th Street to fire Pagano, after Pagano talked him out of it. He talked Irsay into keeping Grigson as well, a stunning development given their deteriorating relationship. That was the night Ryan Grigson, surprised as anyone that he still had a job, said the following:

“Chuck Pagano is a great man.”

That’s why he’s coming back Thursday to the franchise that fired him, walking through those doors on 56th Street for the first time in 16 months. Because Pagano is more than an NFL coach, and because this story is bigger than football.

It’s smaller, too. Small as the tears on a man’s face when he learns there’s a kid he won’t meet.

Return of the Popsicle kid

“Hold on one second,” Pagano is telling me. He’s at the Bears offices outside Chicago, talking to me Monday on a team official’s cell phone, but there’s something — there’s somebody — he needs me to know. The information is on his phone, and I can hear it powering up, playing an electronic tune as Pagano scrolls through his texts.

He’s looking for a message from the popsicle kid.

The kid’s name is Ryan Darby, one of the hundreds of people who reached out to Pagano after the Colts’ coach announced in 2012 that he had been diagnosed with leukemia. Ryan was 9, and had beaten cancer himself. He had a tip for Pagano when the chemo came and the mouth sores started to form. The nurses will try to give you ice, the kid wrote in a letter, but here’s what you need to do: Chew on a popsicle.

“He likes strawberry,” Pagano is telling me as he finds the message from Ryan. They still stay in touch, years after Ryan finished his chemo treatment and rang that bell and went into remission, and years after Chuck did the same.

That’s what the ChuckStrong Tailgate Gala, going on seven years now, is all about: Helping others win their cancer fight, even if for some people the fight hasn’t started yet. Don’t fool yourself; it’s coming. More than one-third of us — 38.4 percent of U.S. adults — will be diagnosed someday with cancer. Read that statistic again.

Not all of us will be as fortunate as Ryan Darby or Chuck Pagano, but Pagano is trying to increase the odds in our favor. The only way to beat cancer is with money, funding the research and machines and procedures that will make it happen, and the ChuckStrong Gala has raised more than $5.5 million.

A year ago — months after Pagano walked into a room inside Lucas Oil Stadium as the Colts’ coach, met with owner Jim Irsay and walked out an unemployed man — Pagano held the Gala anyway.

He held it at Irsay’s house.

That’s who they are, it’s how important this fight is, and more than 450 people will attend this Gala. (You can donate here.) The Colts purchased a table of 10. The Chicago Bears did as well, with team chairman George McCaskey and head coach Matt Nagy among those scheduled to make the drive Thursday with Pagano.

“It’s a group of selfless people,” Pagano says. “You put football aside for a little bit and decide, ‘Hey, this is for something that’s much bigger than football.’ We all know that. Character and class and all that stuff coming together for a great cause, and that’s raising money for cancer research. Speaks to both organizations and ownership and the character.

“To come together like this, have the seventh annual ChuckStrong, for Mr. Irsay to continue to do this … it’s pretty unique, pretty special. I don’t know that it would happen anywhere else, that it would go down like this.”

And now it’s time for you to meet someone. It’s time you met Cory.

"Shut my door"

He was 16.

Cory Lane was an athlete and a good one in Plainfield, swimming and running track and playing soccer. He was a certified soccer referee when he was diagnosed with cancer. It came for Cory fast, and when he visited Lucas Oil Stadium during that emotional 2012 season, when Pagano was watching from a box while Bruce Arians coached the team below, Cory was already in a wheelchair.

On the field before the game, Pagano was told about the boy in the wheelchair. He walked over and …

“Cory lifted himself out of his chair,” Pagano says. “It was a great moment together, we embraced, and he said: ‘You can beat this thing. You’re going to beat cancer, Coach, I know you can do it.’”

Pagano pauses.

“Cory didn’t win his battle,” he says.

Cory Lane, a sophomore at Plainfield High, died on May 21, 2013.

Others have won, children and adults Pagano met as fellow cancer patients and accumulated as friends. People such as Mickey Deputy, darling little girl with Down syndrome. She was in the tunnel before a game in that 2012 season as well, her smile huge, her head shaved, her strength obvious.

Mickey is a cancer survivor, a Junior Colts Cheerleader, a forever friend to Pagano. Her photograph is among those on the wall at his office with the Bears.

“A warrior,” Pagano calls her.

So many warriors he has met along the way, such as Kristen Neher, a woman in her 20s in Minneapolis. The family has Indianapolis roots, and Kristen’s father had contacted Pagano last year, asking if he could send Kristen a note after her cancer diagnosis.

That day a cell phone rings inside Kristen’s room at Regions Hospital, a FaceTime request from a number the family doesn’t recognize. They answer and see Pagano’s smiling face.

Kristen will be at the Gala.

“She just rang the bell a couple weeks ago!” Pagano is saying, practically shouting in victory. “She and her husband Max will be at the event. It will be really cool. You communicate with these people on the front end — ‘Hey, you’re going to be all right, this is what’s going to happen, what you can anticipate’ — and then see them on the back end. It’s a great story, and she’s a warrior.”

So many great stories. Around the Colts complex, employees do their best to keep work and personal separate, but Pagano’s cancer battle transcended that. And so it was that Colts director of football communications Matt Conti walked into Pagano’s office a few years ago and told him about a family friend in Arizona who had been diagnosed with cancer.

“She was looking for something uplifting, and she was a fan of Chuck,” Conti says. “My wife asked me: ‘Hey, do you think Chuck might send a message, write a card?’ I don’t normally do this stuff, but I asked if he’d be willing.

“Chuck goes: ‘Shut my door.’”

Conti leaves, shutting the door behind him. He can hear Pagano inside, on his phone, recording a video message for the woman in Arizona.

Here's what ChuckStrong has done

Pagano was going to be fired after the final game of 2017. Nobody was reporting that, but everybody sort of just … knew. On the sideline before kickoff of the Colts’ season finale against Houston, Amber Kleopfer Senseny was wondering what it all meant.

Senseny is Director of Development at the IU Simon Cancer Center, one of Pagano’s main contacts there. When Pagano walks into Riley Hospital for Children, not sure where a kid he’d come to meet is located, he calls Senseny. When Senseny knew of a woman at the IU Health Simon Cancer Center, a woman who'd had breast cancer for 20 years and raised a small fortune in cancer-fighting funds along the way — a woman who was about to die — she called Pagano.

“Chuck made a private visit,” Senseny says, “to thank her for all she had done.”

Standing on the sideline before that game on Dec. 31, 2017, Senseny wondered about the fate of the ChuckStrong Gala, which in its first year in 2012 raised enough money for the IU Simon Cancer Center to recruit Dr. Utpal Dave from Vanderbilt, where he was pioneering research to identify the genes that lead to the most aggressive cancers and tailor individualized treatment plans for each patient. Between 2013-17 the ChuckStrong Gala had funded the hiring of 11 additional cancer researchers.

“If he was fired,” Senseny says, “we didn’t know what would happen to the Gala.”

Senseny wasn’t standing on the sideline alone. She was standing with Pagano’s wife, Tina. Not a word was spoken about Pagano’s fate, or the ChuckStrong Gala, but Tina Pagano gave Senseny a hug and said, “We will see you next year.”

“There was a very specific message in that,” Senseny says.

The rest of the story: Irsay fired Pagano four hours later, then held the 2018 ChuckStrong Gala at his home four months later, raising $800,000 — enough to recruit the inaugural Pagano Scholar, Dr. Rachel Katzenellenbogen, from the Seattle Children’s Research Institute.

Says Colts CEO Pete Ward: “Chuck is beloved not only here in our building but here in Indianapolis, and the things he did on behalf of cancer patients and cancer survivors and research have been remarkable. And the way the community embraced him so quickly after he arrived was really unprecedented.”

It is a story with so much triumph, but so much loss. Cory Lane lost. The woman with breast cancer. So many more along the way, so many people — “warriors,” he calls them — who have died after meeting Pagano.

And then there is the boy he never met.

This was the 2016 season, a hard year for the Colts, the first of back-to-back 8-8 seasons that cost Pagano his job. By then he had a system, a schedule. He invited a few kids with cancer to every home game, made sure they had all-access passes, and walked onto the field two hours before kickoff to meet with them.

This one day, this game in 2016, Pagano had invited a boy nearing the end of his fight. He walked through the tunnel, looking for the kid. Walked onto the field, looking for the kid. Pagano spotted Pete Ward and asked: “Where is he?”

“I’m sorry, Chuck — he didn’t make it,” Ward told him. “He died overnight.”

Pagano disappeared into the tunnel to compose himself. Two hours later there was a game to play.

At the end of our conversation, I ask Pagano what drives him to keep fighting a disease he has already beaten. He goes quiet for a moment. He’s thinking about those kids he met on the field — and the kid he didn’t meet — and has his answer.

“I’ve always talked about how cancer didn’t happen to me, it happened for me,” he says. “All those people who helped me and encouraged me on my journey, and now I’m on the other side of it and able to do things for others. But they don’t all make it. Some lose their battle.”

Another pause.

“That’s why.”

Find Star columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.

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