I first got to know Jason Botchford when he was five years old. At the time, I was more interested in getting to know his mother. Three years later, he took Nancy’s hand and escorted her to my side in front of the minister who officiated at our wedding. Jason wore a blue sport coat, a white carnation and a big smile.

He and his younger brother, Derek, were inseparable as kids at home in Aurora, Ont. Their dispositions differed, but like their mother, they were whip-smart, stubborn and fun-loving. Jason’s laugh was almost as loud and raucous as his mom’s. If you were in another room and had no clue what was going on, it still made you smile.

Their laughter still echoes through the house. It’s ghostly now.

The boys took up my love of sports. They spent hours on the rec room carpet playing made-up games with baseball cards. They collected little plastic NFL helmets and created imaginary teams and tossed the helmets around and yelled and laughed.

I was a die-hard baseball guy, so I nudged Jason and Derek in that direction, coaching them as kids and beyond. Jason was a catcher, as I was. When he turned 21, he joined me on a local rec-league team in Newmarket, Ont. In 1996, Derek came of age and became our teammate, too.

I was in my 50s by then, my shoulder a mass of scar tissue. Jason replaced me as the regular catcher and pitched a little. Derek was our shortstop. I caught when Jase pitched. The rest of the time, I played first base.

Before a game one Sunday, I asked someone to take a photo of the three of us by the dugout at the Newmarket Fairgrounds. That’s Derek on the left, Jason on the right.

I look at that photo every now and then. It makes me feel good.

The boys never played hockey. Nancy was relieved.

Jason died last spring. You probably know that if you’re a Canucks fan, and maybe if you’re not. The kid who never played hockey had grown up to become a whip-smart, stubborn, fun-loving hockey writer. Yes, there was a lot of his mom in the man, and the father, and the writer.

Folks called him Botch, and he forged a unique brand – old-school journalism at its core but also edgy, flamboyant and deeply devoted to Canucks fans. Only last spring did I come to understand how devoted they were to him.

When Jase was a kid, his mom used to say, “That boy is full of beans.” He never changed. When he hit his stride on the hockey beat, his energy and passion splashed onto the page and the screen and the airwaves. Equal parts journalist and showman, he took his job seriously, but not himself. He yelled. He laughed. He never backed down. As his friend and colleague Jeff Paterson said in a moving final podcast: “That was Botch. He loved the give and take.”

We need an army, he said. He led it, right to the end.

I’ve heard some Vancouver folks say it doesn’t seem right to start another Canucks season without Botch. For me, it doesn’t seem right to start another day without him.

The so-called stages of grief lack neat demarcation. We each find our own ways to cope with the death of a loved one. But losing a child is especially awful.

Some of you understand what this pain feels like. At the beginning, it reaches in and holds on. Eventually it ebbs and flows. On some days it fades. On others it engulfs you, takes your breath away, drives you into dark corners.

Triggers wait in ambush: a song lyric, a picture in a frame, an old podcast you stumble across by accident.

Or something you hear a grandchild say about her daddy.

Just as he never showed a particular interest in hockey, Jason had never mentioned journalism as a possible career path. He took history and politics at Western University in London, Ont., then waded into a series of short-lived jobs with his brother and friends, generating familiar Botchford laugh tracks along the way.

They bought a beat-up truck and started a driveway-sealing enterprise called Kiss My Asphalt. Two driveways later, they were done, the truck ditched. They donned white overalls, hairnets and hard hats to work in a chocolate-bar factory with an all-you-can-eat assembly line. They did landscaping and worked in a computer parts plant.

Years earlier, I’d left the newspaper business to supervise the journalism program at Centennial College in Toronto. One spring day in 1996, Jason said: “I want to enrol in your program.” I was surprised. I also knew he’d be good at journalism. And I knew it would beat kissing asphalt.

Before school started that fall, we agreed that our relationship would remain a secret. Our last names made that easy. During Jason’s two years at Centennial, no one knew except my faculty colleagues.

He got no breaks. I covered his assignments with my scrawls and sent him back to rewrite, just as I did other students. (The other day I dug out some of those old assignments and winced at a couple of my critiques. I might have been tougher on him than his classmates.)

But as a budding reporter brimming with curiosity and chutzpah, he was a quick study. He was also the only student in my experience who sat at his workstation with a tattered, hard-bound thesaurus on his lap.

Watching him blossom and flourish was the highlight of my teaching career. But back then I could not have imagined him as a hockey journalist, much less an award-winning writer and broadcaster who galvanized a big-city fan base.

Jason at his desk in The Province office, 2008.

In his application to our journalism program, Jason wrote that his ambition was to cover sports or politics. Covering the Blue Jays would be “the ultimate,” he told one of my faculty colleagues during an entrance interview. Early on, however, news was his niche. He excelled during an internship at the Toronto Sun and landed a job there. But with layoffs looming, he took a flyer, moved to Vancouver and made his mark as an aggressive news reporter for The Province.

Then a job covering the Canucks opened up. The kid who never played hockey jumped at it.

If you’re a Canucks fan, you know the rest.

Or maybe not. That’s one reason I’m writing this.

Amid the crushing grief that followed Jason’s death, I kept thinking I should write something. Writing was what I did, after all. Writing was what we did.

Jason and I both worked for The Athletic, and before that, we both had worked for Postmedia. One day we each had a story on the same page in the National Post. His story was about the Canucks. Mine was about the Blue Jays. I still have that page somewhere.

But as spring turned into summer, I could not find the words to write about Jason. The pain was too raw. Writing about him was too personal, and I’ve never been comfortable writing about personal matters. I knew I could not do his life justice, and what I’m doing here still feels woefully inadequate.

Last spring, I was overwhelmed by the avalanche of tributes from his fans and fellow writers. In June, I attended the memorial event at the Commodore Ballroom and was overwhelmed again, this time by the huge turnout and the bittersweet Botchford stories and the poignant speech his wife Kathryn gave onstage with Derek at her side.

I kept thinking of an Eagles song: “There’s a Hole in the World Tonight.” In our family’s world, that hole remains.

The past three years have been hard. Nancy died in 2016. Jason and Derek’s dad died in 2018. Then, out of the blue, Jason was gone. He was 48.

What finally inspired me to write was the Botchford Project. The Canucks, The Athletic and a group of Vancouver hockey journalists have teamed up to honour Jason by selecting 10 budding hockey writers who will be credentialed for a Canucks morning skate and the game that night. Veteran journalists will serve as their mentors as they prepare their stories for publication on the Canucks’ site. The Athletic will pay them.

I can’t think of a more fitting tribute. Jason not only encouraged young writers, he championed them.

Yes, I still feel inept as I try to write about the Jason I knew. But in more than 50 years in this business, I have never seen such a big fan base so connected to a writer. I wanted his army to understand more about his origin story. And I’ll admit it: I did this for me, too.

Writing this unleashed a cascade of memories. The tip Jason gave me from one of his sources that put me on the trail of a baseball scoop in 2008. The touching note he sent me after my story about Roy Halladay’s playoff no-hitter in 2010. All those times we talked shop, his passion flowing as he rambled on about a story he was chasing, or a source he’d pissed off, or a young writer he was pressing The Athletic to hire.

But most of the memories cut deeper. The night Nancy and I watched as Jason lavishly re-enacted his ring presentation to Kat. The babies – Sienna, then Keira, then Hudson – and the love and fun that flowed into and out of that family as they grew. Jason in the kitchen, preparing a meal, chopped food flying in all directions. Jason and Kat madly flossing together last Christmas to the strains of “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Travelogue tales from countless Phish concerts. Me, watching with wonder as he soothed an upset child, and with delight as he roared around the house, chasing his squealing kids. They were his joy.

We last talked a couple of weeks before he died. I asked about the kids. He went down the list. Sienna’s love for her dance classes. Keira’s delight in her new glasses. Hudson’s fixation on the Incredible Hulk and an urgent question: Can red Hulk beat up green Hulk? No, Jase told him. Green Hulk rules.

We laughed and laughed, and then we said goodbye.

Much of how Jason and I felt about each other was unspoken. I made sure he knew I was proud of him as a journalist, and more so as a husband and father. But I wish we had talked more. We had more to say, I think. But we lived so far apart. We led busy lives. It’s an old story.

But after he died, I learned that he’d had a little more to say about the two of us.

Following that tribute at the Commodore in June, I went backstage to thank the hockey writers who had regaled the audience with their heartfelt and riotous stories about Jason. As I was leaving, broadcaster Matt Sekeres introduced me to a friend and told a story. Once, during a conversation with Jason, Matt said he’d learned that I was Jason’s stepfather.

No, Jason said. He’s my father. He raised me.

Matt told me he’d heard Jason say the same thing to others several times when my name happened to come up.

I’d never heard that story. It was the tipping point at the end of an emotional night. Before I lost it, I had to leave.

I did not raise Jason. I pitched in. His mother did the heavy work. But yes, he is my son. I’m proud of him. I miss him so much. And I know that hole will never close.

He’s gone, but he left so many good memories, and a wonderful family, and a lot of laughs, and now the Botchford Project will preserve his journalism legacy. When I think of Jason, I try to focus on those things.

If you were a friend or a fan of Botch, I hope you can, too. He’d like that.

Photos by John Lott / The Athletic