Sometimes you're just better off starting at the beginning, which in this case is October 1984, a crystal clear Saturday afternoon in Charlottesville, Va. I'd driven down that morning from The District to cover a University of Virginia football game for The Washington Post. I was approaching the spiral staircase that led to the press box at Scott Stadium when i was stopped by a gentleman who extended his hand and said, "Excuse me, are you Mike Wilbon?" He introduced himself and handed me a business card. I didn't look at the card immediately since I was a little surprised he knew my name. I hadn't appeared on any television shows at that point; I was 25 and a novice still at The Post. He said we'd met once before, probably at a Howard football game, maybe introduced by Glen Harris or Chuck Franklin, which made total sense.

We chatted for a few moments about local sports and the fact that Virginia was having a really nice football season. I put the business card in my pocket and pretty much forgot about it and the chance encounter.

And now we fast-forward 11 years to the winter of 1995. I was dating, happily, a young woman named Sheryl Watkins. We'd gone on enough dates that apparently it was time to meet her parents, who had invited us to Sunday dinner. Late in the week, Sheryl had some intel she wanted to spring on me. We hadn't known each other all that long but i had known her friends Tatia Williams and Stephanie Clemons for years. They'd shared with her how legendarily awful my memory was. Sheryl said, "Turns out, apparently, you've already met my father."

And without a hint or as much as another word, I said with absolute confidence, "I met him in 1984 on a blindingly sunny Saturday afternoon by the spiral staircase at Scott Stadium. He stopped me and introduced himself and we chatted and I think he gave me his business card." 

Stunned, Sheryl stammered through, "Well, how in the world does a man with no memory and no additional information come up with that?"

The answer then, as now, is I have no earthly idea why I remembered the encounter, how I made the connection between that man, who was coming to visit his daughter, a freshman at UVA, and this Sheryl's father. It makes no sense. But we had dinner that Sunday, talked only a little about the encounter, and Dr. Benjamin Watkins turned out indeed to be the man I met that day nearly 11 years ago. But had not seen since that either of us knew of.

Let's fast-forward again, four more years to April of 1999...15 years since the encounter at Charlottesville. Sheryl and I had been married for two years, and were moving from my townhouse in Fairfax to our new home in Bethesda. We were clearing out stuff to be moved or thrown away when Sheryl discovered something that had been sitting in a desk drawer for 15 years: her father's business card, the one he'd given me that day so long ago. The circle had been completed. The entire episode is still surreal to us even now, married 25 years next month.

What had been easier to accept, what was not at all cosmic or in need of explanation, was that I knew I had hit the father-in-law lottery. My own father died when I was 27; there would be no chance encounter or any meeting between Sheryl and her father-in-law. But it turned out Raymond and Pete were opposite sides of the same coin. They even served in the Army in Germany about the same time by, best we can tell, never actually crossed paths. Nevertheless, they were two Southern boys who had so many of the same corny down home sayings it was scary. There would be many afternoons of watching football together on NFL Sundays, college and pro basketball on the rare occasions I was home and the exploding career of a young Tiger who would redefine and redirect our sporting interests.

The only caper we ever really pulled involved me shortening our Honeymoon by two days so that I could get back to Chicago for Game 1 of Bulls-Bullets April 25, 1997. I got Pete and my brother Don second-row seats at United Center. How could any bride's father be upset with that? My mother-in-law often teased that her husband was so obsessed with competition he'd go to a stadium to watch the Kindergarten play the first grade. Turned out to be one of a thousand reasons Dr. Benjamin Watkins, rest his soul, and I were, from the beginning, kindred spirits.