Each year the calendar turns at this time and we remember some absent friends who’ve been left behind. Maybe a better way to phrase it is they’ve gone ahead.

In February it was college friend Scott Hollis, 56, and Ricky Lennard, 61, who perished one February morning in a plane crash in Shreveport. Ricky was an all-time great Little League dad who 20 years ago loaned me one of his boys, Alan, who became a fearless Oriole at age 10 and is now a Navy Seal. We tried to have as much fun in Little League as possible — learn how to spit sunflower seeds, spend time practicing sliding through a giant mud puddle — because, sooner or later, real life happens. Sometimes there’s rain at the parade.

Dan Jenkins, 90, passed away in March in his Fort Worth hometown after a career that you’d have to file in the Remarkable Department; the Most Influential Sportswriter of the 20^th Century is a good place to start. Novelist. Screenwriter. Husband. Dad to three. Friend to many.

I got to know him for a little while and loved to hear him talk of golf and musicals and food and football, or “foobaw,” as he often typed it. And family. He loved talking about his family and friends. He brought the world a lot of laughter and made sure country club games like golf didn’t take themselves too seriously. You can never have too much of what Dan Jenkins amplified in this world.

In July we lost another sportswriter. Orville Kince “Buddy” Davis died at 72 from complications of a stroke suffered six years earlier. For 50 years he toted the mail for the Ruston Daily Leader as its executive sports editor, photographer, writer, and man about town. Before he started keeping numbers in his cell phone, he owned a Rolodex the size of a Volkswagen. He became less and less mobile through the years but kept writing from his bed until the end, and he kept welcoming friend after All-Pro after Hall of Famer to his suite for visits.

When he first had the stroke and hadn’t gained enough mobility to use his phone yet, me and a couple of other friends would take turns going by each day to read and respond to his text messages for him. One day the first three messages were from Terry Bradshaw, Doug Williams, and Archie Manning. A Monsters of the Midway type deal.

Everyone misses O.K. Buddy.

In mid-November, former sportswriter and public relations stud Jerre Todd of Arlington, Texas died at 87. I was only around him a couple of times but he was one of Dan Jenkins’ best friends for 70 years and his wife is one of the best and most beautiful people you could know. Team Jenkins and Team Todd have been the center of a special group of friends for such a long time; it’s heart-hurting when that much wit and laughter leaves the building. I always smile when I think of Mr. Todd because he’s the center of one of my favorite stories.

In real life when they were young men, unattached, prior to meeting their forever wives (or “between movies”) and sharing a crummy apartment, Dan told Jerre to go to the Fort Worth paper and interview for the baseball beat opening with sports editor extraordinaire Blackie Sherrod, who was in the process of building one of the most star-studded sports staffs in the history of ball at the Fort Worth Press. Jerre came to the newsroom, Dan pointed out Sherrod editing a story, and Jerre ran across the newsroom and did a hook-slide into Sherrod’s desk. Sherrod looked down at him, said “You’re hired!,” and went back to work.

Beautiful.

Finally, our friend Carley McCord, a south Louisiana-based reporter and broadcaster who has helped the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame a good bit and in valuable ways the past few years, was one of five who died in the Lafayette small plane crash last week. She was only 30. The phone call about that one made you just want to throw up; no other way to say it. A person so young and that hard-working. And willing to work. Married less than two years. It’s a brutal reminder that we aren’t built for life down here.

So if for no other reason than to honor these lives that left us so much laughter and offered us so much entertainment, be nice to somebody today. Maybe we can start something and make 2020 our best year yet.

We’ll meet again …

-30-

By JOHN JAMES MARSHALL/Designated Writers

You are probably a bigger New Orleans Saints fan than I am, so I’m not going to blame you if you want to skip another post-mortem on Sunday’s 26-20 loss to Minnesota in the NFC Wild Card game. I like the Saints — a lot, actually — but I was going to have to revert into the Green Bay fan that I have always been had the Saints won Sunday.

But I understand your pain.

Losses like this are just so … so … final. One minute, you are thinking you are still going to find a way to win and the next you see Minnesota’s Kyle Rudolph catching one in the corner of the end zone.

Silence in the Superdome.

You realize that this is the third straight year for a really, really tough playoff loss and that is hard to take. Seventeen weeks of buildup and then it’s gone, zapping every bit of fandom right out of your being. People who love the opera or bird watching never have to deal with this kind of pain.

Let’s be honest, though: This was, by far, the third toughest to take of the three previous playoff losses. Games like Sunday happen all the time; what happened the previous two years is 100-year-flood-type stuff.

Please allow me a couple of points that may seem like I’m rubbing it in, when I’m really not.

(1) When the Vikings lined up on third-and-goal in overtime in that formation, the Saints should have known what was coming and called an immediate time out (they give you a few hundreds time outs in OT) when they saw Rudolph, who is 6-foot-6, being guarded by P.J. Williams, who isn’t.

(2) That’s not offensive pass interference so please don’t try to say it is or even might be.

(3) Anybody can beat anybody in the NFL playoffs. When you don’t show up ready, or when you get a bad break or two, the other team has coaches, too. And the players in the different-color jerseys are pretty good, otherwise they’d be at home watching. It’s a thin line.

And I won’t remind you that had a Seattle tight end been three inches closer to the goal line last week, the Saints wouldn’t have even had to play in this game because they would have earned a bye.

Instead, it’s now a bye-bye.