Maybe one of the current Twins stars will be to your kid what Brooks Robinson was to me

After a certain age, death becomes a nagging companion. You lose parents and friends, colleagues and acquaintances, and the slow drip of sadness becomes an unyielding stream.

I lost my parents almost 20 years ago, one after the other, and those losses made me want to ignore death for the rest of my life, and especially when on the job, which is dominated by the chronicling of the young and vibrant.

This week, I could not avoid reality. Brooks Robinson, the Hall of Fame third baseman for the Baltimore Orioles, died at age 86. For me, this is the end of innocence.

Immortals are not supposed to die.

Sports let us down frequently, and whoever said that you should not want to meet your heroes was probably a sports fan turned sports journalist.

I was lucky. I identified Brooks Robinson as the right kind of idol when I was young and impressionable, and he never let me down. He was the only athlete I would ever worship.

Robinson is the reason I fell in love with baseball. He is one reason I chose to write about sports, because he made sports seem transcendent and yet accessible.

I became aware of sports when living in Pennsylvania as the Orioles became the best franchise in baseball. When we moved to the outskirts of Baltimore, the Orioles became my team, and Robinson became the player I would mimic, the player whose glove I would buy.

Later in life, I would learn that I chose wisely.

Jeff Idelson, when he was the president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, once told me that two Hall of Famers stood above all others as humble gentlemen: Harmon Killebrew and Brooks.

That confirmed my experience. My parents would take me to Orioles games, and Brooks' downtown restaurant, and to every autograph-signing session he had. He was friendly and gracious, and, somehow, he looked more like my father than a star athlete.

Brooks was balding, and he didn't hide it, and late in his career he carried a bit of a beer gut, and his muscles looked more suited for mowing the lawn than smashing home runs.

If you were a mediocre athlete, he was someone you could imagine emulating. Maybe, with enough practice, you could snare those ground balls, and maybe, because Brooks had an odd push-from-the-chest throwing motion, you could even survive without a powerful arm or body.

Brooksie was also a star at a time when star athletes lived among us. They took jobs in the offseason. They did not live in gated communities. Modern athletes are justified in making whatever they can, and many of them handle their financial success with grace, but there is no longer any illusion that we all belong to the same financial class, not when Ferrari brochures lay around clubhouse couches the way you or I might leave a Costco pamphlet on the coffee table.

At the height of his stardom, Brooks would walk through his restaurant and shake hands. He would sign autographs if you bumped into him on the street.

We are approaching the end of another baseball season. The local nine is pretty good, very interesting and quite likable, and the Twins play in a modern masterpiece of a ballpark.