Matt Tullis

With three minutes left in the first half of a game against the University of Findlay, Kari Daugherty of Ashland, the best rebounder in all of Division II women’s basketball -- and one of the best scorers too -- went up for the ball. At the same time, though, a Findlay player’s foot hit her knee. Nine players sprinted down the court, and within nine seconds, Findlay had scored on a layup and drawn a foul. But nobody was watching.

“Creech.” The name escaped my lips somewhere in the third mile of a five-mile run. It was a name I had been trying to think of, off-and-on, for the better part of a decade, the last name of my nurse Janet from Viking Street in Orrville, Ohio. Janet brought me sausage biscuits from McDonald’s just about every morning because it was the only thing I would eat. She was typically my nurse on first shift. She had short brown hair and was about the same age as my mom, and so she felt very motherly to me.

These are stories. They happen to be some of our best. These are stories told by some of the best writers we have the pleasure of working with, and told in slightly long fashion not for their own sake, but because that’s how many words it took to show you the whole story.