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It was the eighth grade and I was playing basketball for my Central Middle School team. We were in a league with all of the other middle schools in the city of Quincy. My team was one of the better teams in the league and we had a big game against Atlantic Middle School late in the season.

In the days leading up to the game, I first hear the name John O’Connell. I had never really heard the name before, but all everyone was saying was how good he was. I considered myself to be pretty good, so if I didn’t know him I figured he couldn’t be that good.

As soon as I walked into Atlantic’s gym for pregame warm-ups, I started to realize what all the hype was about. Before every game I would always look at the other team in lay-up lines and size them up. Peering down at Atlantic’s end on that day I saw a 6-foot-2 eighth grader draining 15-foot jump shots effortlessly. I didn’t need to look at a program to know that was John O’Connell.

When the game began it became clear that this kid wasn’t playing on the same level as the rest of us. O’Connell was a man-child on the court, doing whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. He took overmatched defenders out to the perimeter and knocked down jumpers. He’d then take them inside and put them through a series of low post moves that invariably ended with an easy lay-up.

We had a good team, and hung tough, but O’Connell was just too much. We ended up losing 38-34, with O’Connell scoring all but four of his team’s points.

It was the most dominating performance I had ever witnessed first-hand. I later realized that the reason I hadn’t heard of him much is that he didn’t play youth basketball in Quincy, and therefore, he went under my radar. If I had never heard much of John O’Connell before that day, I would hear and see plenty of him in the future.

Our next meeting would come about six months later at one of the first freshman football practice at North Quincy High School. I think we both recognized each other, but being the tough 14-year-olds we were, neither one of us acknowledged the other. I didn’t want to like him. I mean, this was the kid that just torched my basketball team last year.

It wasn’t too hard for me to dislike him at first because he showed up after we went through the brutal double-sessions in the late summer. He just strolled down to the practice field and everyone already seemed to know him. He seemed a little bit cocky, and I had my mind made up: I did not like John O’Connell.

My mind changed somewhere during that season, although I can’t really remember when or why. It just happened gradually as I spent a lot of time with John (or Okie as he became to me) and I realized that I was wrong about him. He was far from the cocky kid I initially thought he was. Instead, he was a very funny and good-natured person. We had some good times during that freshman football season, but it was during basketball that we really became friends.

High school was a little different for me. I was used to being one of the more popular kids in school growing up, but in high school this wasn’t the case during my freshman year. North Quincy wasn’t the high school in my district, but it was considered the better of the two high schools in the city so I went there. But doing this meant that the majority of my classmates were from the opposite part of the city, and most knew it each other from middle school.

Playing sports offered an avenue to make friends, and Okie was one of the first I made. Okie was one of the few friends I made during football that played basketball too, so we were around each other a lot freshman year. Okie knew most of the other kids on the freshman basketball team, but rather than hang out with them and ditch me, he included me and brought me into his circle of friends. This was one of the things that I’ve always remembered about Okie – how he went out of his way to be my friend at a time when he didn’t have to.

I had as much fun that season as any other in my life. I formed a trio of good friends with Okie and Matt Donovan, another good basketball player who Okie knew through youth basketball. We were friends on the court and off, and those two remained good friends of mine for the rest of high school and beyond.

Okie and I played together throughout high school. We both stopped playing football after freshman year, but played basketball and baseball together for the rest of our high school careers. Through playing sports together for so long, Okie and I became friends off the fields and courts. That’s the beauty of sports. You meet people with similar interests, and through competing alongside one another, you develop a bond that really can’t be formed in many other ways.

Sports continued to be a central part of our relationship even after our competitive playing days ended with high school. We still played together in pick-up basketball leagues at the YMCA or would even play sports video games together on Playstation. And while sports began our friendship, our friendship went way beyond just sports. We had so much in common and eventually became best friends. It’s funny how things worked out, because this was the kid that eight years ago I thought I’d never like, but now he was my best friend.

I really think sports would have continued to be a major part of our lives. We would have continued to play in basketball leagues together, gone to watch Red Sox games at bars and probably even coached our sons in Little League.

I talk about Okie in the past tense now, because over a month ago he was killed outside of a bar in Westfield. While trying to break up a fight that a friend was involved in, Okie was sucker-punched in the jaw and knocked unconscious. Okie fell back helplessly and hit his head on the cement sidewalk. The injuries to his head from the fall did too much damage to Okie’s brain, and he did not survive.

While this loss really hasn’t set in and hit me yet, one of the most comforting things to do is to think back to all of the great memories I have with Okie. It’s bitter sweet to read the old articles from our senior year of high school; reading the stories about Okie and me leading North to a win.

And while sports are a big part of my memories of Okie, the main memories of him are of the great person he was. He was one of the most amazing people I’ve ever known, and although were the same age, he is someone that I look up to and hope that I can live the rest of my life the way he lived his 21 years.

At the time I may have been a bit put off by him strolling down to football practice freshman year, but I am thankful that he did because I got to meet John O’Connell, and becoming friends with him is one of the best things that ever happened to me.