We found out my husband was going to die on June 8, the same day the Warriors beat the Cavs to close out their second straight NBA title. He passed away on Wednesday, before the start of another NBA season. I always think of time in terms of sports seasons. That is how my mind works.

Earlier that same week was the MLB Draft. I had spent the previous six months covering the lead-up to the draft and had blocked off most of that week to cover this year’s proceedings. My husband was admitted to the hospital by then, and I missed most of it. “I’m so sorry you had to miss the draft,” he said. That is how his mind worked.

Our love was about so much more than sports, but sports always played a central role. We met in October 1997. Both of us were working for The Daily Northwestern, me as a design editor and Chris as a news editor. We had both recently gone through break-ups and mutual friends from the paper set us up. No rebound has ever been sweeter.

One of our first dates was a Northwestern football game. Chris was from Green Bay, Wisconsin, and he told me later that it endeared him to me that I — a California girl — made it through the entire game despite the driving snow and not being able to feel my feet. To be honest, being at the game with him, I would have stood in the snow forever.

Over the years, our interests mostly aligned, with the exception of our favorite NFL team. Chris was, of course, a Cheesehead through and through, while I grew up going to games in the top row of Candlestick Park, yelling, “Jerry’s open!” When we started dating, the 49ers and Packers had a brief rivalry. Ultimately, it was that rivalry that made me know I wanted to marry him.

In January 1999, the Niners and Packers met in the NFC wild-card game at the ‘Stick. I was supposed to fly back to Evanston for school the day before the game, but there was a huge snowstorm in the Midwest and it pushed my flight back to the day of the game. As it would turn out, my flight was one of the last to land at O’Hare for a week (a flight a few hours later ended up stuck on the tarmac for hours, leading to the airline passenger bill of rights).

This was back in the day before most people had cell phones and Uber was just a word you said before “awesome, dude.” Getting from O’Hare to Evanston in the winter could be a bit of a challenge. The El involved going all the way downtown before coming back out to the suburbs; cab drivers were often reluctant to get you there, preferring to go into the city, and the weather could make it a tough ride. Chris had come down from Green Bay a few days earlier but had caught a bad cold and was laid up for most of that weekend. When I talked to him before the flight, I told him it was OK if I took a cab back rather than him picking me up at the airport. Instead, he made me a deal: “if the Packers win, I’ll pick you up. If the Niners win, you’re on your own.”

The flight, for whatever reason, was filled with Wisconsin football fans returning from the Rose Bowl through SFO. The pilot knew his audience and piped the radio broadcast of the game through one of the channels at each seat. As the game wound down to the final seconds, I was torn between wanting the Niners to win and wanting a ride back to campus. Steve Young dropped back to pass, he stumbled and the signal for the station turned to static. It took me several minutes before I overheard a devastated Badger fan explain what happened after Young’s stumble.

When I got off the plane, I immediately began thinking of how I was going to hail a cab in the snow. I reached the end of the walkway tunnel and there was Chris with a funny grin on his face. “I thought the Niners won,” I said. “They cheated,” he replied, “but either way, I didn’t want to eat dinner without you.” How can you not want to marry a man like that?

Chris was a year ahead of me in school and he moved to Washington, D.C., after he graduated. I followed him in June 2000. Baseball had always been my first love in terms of sports, but for most of the time I was in college, it took a back burner to other activities. Then the A’s went on their magical AL West title run that year, and it drew me back to the sport. Back then, the only time we’d get to see the A’s play was when they were on ESPN, which was a rare occurrence. Chris had grown up rooting for Bay Area baseball teams despite living in Wisconsin, a product of his grandmother residing in the Sacramento area. He claimed it was easy to start rooting for the A’s again, but I suspect his interest in the team was another airport-pickup-in-the-snow kind of thing.

We got married on May 26, 2002, just days after Jeremy Giambi was unceremoniously shipped to the Phillies. We were in the Bay Area then, getting ready for the wedding and our puzzlement over that trade helped us get through the pre-wedding jitters. Later that summer, we were back in D.C. during the Streak, staying up late every night to find out if the A’s won yet another game.

In 2003, we moved back to the Bay Area so that Chris could attend law school at UC Hastings. Law school is an all-consuming kind of thing and it was soon pretty clear that I’d need to add a hobby to fill my time when he was studying in the evening and on weekends. There was a new blog network called MVN that put a call out for writers. We had just returned from spring training in 2004 and Chris encouraged me to try out for the spot. I didn’t think I had much of shot, but I was one of two writers they picked to write about the A’s.

Suddenly, all of the rambling thoughts I shared with Chris over the years about the A’s had another audience. A few months later, I was approached by what was then called The Insiders and later became known as Scout to take over their fledgling A’s site. This wasn’t a blog but a subscription-based news site where I would have to cover games in person and focus on player development rather than the big league team. I wasn’t sure I could do it. Chris encouraged me. “I’ll help you,” he said. “I’ll take photos.”

And so began OaklandClubhouse — a name he created — which, until our first son was born in 2010, was our baby. During the regular season, we would spend two weekends a month driving to Stockton or Sacramento to cover Ports and River Cats games. We also would go down to Phoenix every year for a few days of spring training. We were always a team — me with my recorder and him with his camera. I would write thousands of articles at Scout, but I was always the most proud of the photo galleries I put together of his shoots at those games.

Over the years, it became harder for us to cover games together as the demands of his job increased and we had to balance the schedules for our kids with their soccer games and Boy Scout meetings. The last game we covered together was in Sacramento last season when the Sounds came to visit the River Cats. We hadn’t been to Sacramento often since the A’s had lost their affiliation there, so it was a nice opportunity for us to catch up with guys like Johnny Doskow and Gabe Ross whom we had worked with so closely in the early days of the site.

It was around that time that I had left Scout and took OaklandClubhouse out on its own. It was never going to be a moneymaker without a network affiliation behind it, but Chris encouraged me to keep it going regardless, knowing how much of myself I had put into the site over the years. He also encouraged me to reach out to the folks at The Athletic when it was announced they were launching a Bay Area vertical. He was so proud of his wife, the sportswriter.

Chris wasn’t diagnosed with angiosarcoma — an extremely rare and aggressive cancer that attacks the lining of the blood vessels — until June, but he began experiencing debilitating pain in his back and later his hip in December. We thought he had a torn labrum in his hip, but cortisone shots and rehab weren’t working. As it turned out, the pain was from a tumor. Despite his pain, he still coached our youngest son’s T-ball team this spring. Since our boys were old enough to play sports, he was always “Coach Chris,” coaching their baseball and soccer teams. Kids loved him and he loved organizing practices and encouraging them during games. He had a lot of clipboards.

While he was sick this summer, we spent a lot of time watching A’s games both in the hospital and during the brief few weeks he was able to be home. He took a lot of inspiration from their comeback style of play this summer, but I think mostly it was a way for us to share something that took our minds off of his diagnosis, much the same way the Giambi trade took the edge off of pre-wedding jitters.

Chris was the most logical person I ever met. If there was a way to get from Point A to Point B, he’d find the most efficient route. I may get from Point A to Point B, but there will be a lot of stops and turns along the way. One of the things he found most amusing about me was how superstitious I am. He loved telling people about how his crazy wife used to wait in the morning in D.C. to watch the scores on ESPN’s Bottomline to see if the A’s won the night before, and how mad I got if he told me first who won because it was unlucky.

On Wednesday night, while I lay trying to think of anything but the worst loss of my life, I went to my MLB At Bat app to check the day’s scores. It wouldn’t load. Somehow, I like to think that’s his way of saying, “I’m still here.”

Christopher Robert Lockard died on Aug. 15, 2018. He was 41 years old. He is survived by his wife, two wonderful boys, his parents, his brother, and a whole world of people who will miss him forever.

(Top photo courtesy of Melissa Lockard)