The widow of a veteran sportswriter who was gunned down at a Maryland newspaper last year has completed the book he worked on for more than a decade – a “promise” she fulfilled to honor her late husband’s legacy.

Andrea Chamblee, 58, never saw the drafts that her husband, John McNamara, wrote until after he was among the five people killed when a shotgun-wielding gunman stormed into the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis in June 2018.

But one year later, amid delays in the trial of accused gunman Jarrod Ramos, Chamblee told the Washington Post that she’s completed her late husband’s 328-page history, “The Capital of Basketball,” with the help of another writer and longtime friend of McNamara’s.

“If John could ask me to do anything, I know he’d ask me to finish this,” Chamblee, of Silver Spring, told the newspaper. “I already feel like I promised him. It’s a love letter to John, and it’s a promise I want to keep.”

Chamblee said she especially struggled while completing missing captions from McNamara’s pages, details he left out because his decades of experience and knowledge of high school and college basketball in the region made them extraneous prior to publication.

“I felt his absence when I was working on it,” Chamblee said. “He didn’t have to look up any of the stuff I had to look up.”

But the book — set to be published in November — finally came to fruition after an assist from writer David Elfin, who previously co-authored a book about a now-defunct University of Maryland basketball arena with McNamara.

Elfin said he spent about six months reading and editing McNamara’s work before finishing the final chapter, wrapping up a detailed account of 100 years of high school basketball in the DC area based on more than 150 interviews.

“I hope that we made him proud,” Elfin told the Washington Post. “I know Andrea did and I hope I did, too.”

Chamblee said she’s unsure about the fate of her husband’s remaining notes and outlines. She sent a photo of them to an museum installation dedicated to the five shooting Capital Gazette victims, but questioned whether his book belongs there as well.

“This is the last piece of John I’ll have, and I don’t want to share it,” Chamblee told the newspaper. “I want to keep it and be selfish and put it under my pillow, but that’s not what John would have wanted, so I’m going to have to let it go.”

Ramos, meanwhile, has pleaded not criminally responsible in the shooting by using Maryland’s version of an insanity plea, which has delayed his trial.

The 39-year-old man who had a history of harassing journalists at the newspaper has been ordered to undergo a mental health evaluation by state health department officials and is scheduled to go on trial on five counts of first-degree murder and other counts in November.

With Post wires