So this is what happens when a journalist doesn’t maintain a safe distance from his subject matter.

Whether your career aspirations involve covering the high school basketball tournament for a weekly gazette or hobnobbing with presidents and CEOs, the warnings come cascading from well-meaning mentors.

Don’t get too close, they caution. You’re the enemy, not their friend. When the day arrives and it’s demanded that you deliver the hard news about that person, your integrity will be challenged, if not completely compromised.

Well, they’re right.

The voice mail was stamped at 6:08 p.m. Tuesday. Call home. Call home now. And this wasn’t the We Just Won the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes voice. It was the I’ve Got News That Will Break Your Heart voice.

Two relatively meaningless basketball games and a few hours of fitful sleep later, I find myself stopped in mid-sentence, stuck in a bleary, blurry daze, desperate to put those pieces together long enough to get through the day after. And I can’t.

Details remain sketchy, but the facts are subtle as a sucker punch.

Lee St. Hilaire, the greatest high school quarterback I’ve had the pleasure to cover in a half-lifetime spent in the business, the kid with the big-league arm and million-dollar smile, is dead, one month shy of his 21st birthday.

Bangor police are investigating, but family and friends say it was an apparent suicide. When I responded to my wife’s peculiar message by calling every number in my mental Rolodex, it was one of Lee’s many cousins who picked up the phone at my parents’ home in Monmouth and relayed the news.

Told you. Too close.

If you live within rock-throwing distance of that eight-mile stretch of U.S. Route 202, where the only two stoplights blink continually, it’s no exaggeration or punch line to a bad Maine joke to say that everybody knows everybody. In that respect, Lee was a friend by association.

One of his cousins has worked with me off-and-on at the newspaper for the last decade. His cousin, who answered the phone, attends my church. On Tuesday night, we lamented the kid and kicked ourselves for not praying for him more frequently and fervently.

Lee needed more Divine direction than the rest of us, through no fault of his own. It’s just that in our world’s bizarre economy, in many respects he had it all, and people like that require a little extra blessing.

It was an unseasonably hot autumn afternoon on the old, dust-ridden football field at Lake Region High School in Naples when I had my first eye-to-belly button encounter with Lee. He was a fourth-grade water boy, wearing an oversized, green jersey, carrying a tray of plastic bottles at the end of his left arm and cradling a football with his right. Most kids his age already had begun glaring at adults my age as if we had three heads attached to our shoulders, but the way Lee bent my ear, I would have sworn he was running for mayor.

The smile, the football and the friendly demeanor were Lee’s trademarks. When Lee reached high school, he never played defense because his coach, Norm Thombs, was too smart to let him risk injury. So he paced the sideline, football betwixt elbow and rib cage. Still smiling. Still working the room.

“Oh my God! Did you see that?”

I laughed then and now at the irony, because those of us blessed to walk the sidelines at Winthrop games from 1998 to 2001 spoke similarly, mouths open wide, at least once each Ramblers offensive possession.

In our neighborhood, the hyperbole began when he hit sixth grade, and Lee lived up to every word. No, actually, he was better than most of us imagined. It wasn’t merely that he could throw the ball 60 to 70 yards on a dime and had the fortitude of a burglar in broad daylight when it came to throwing into double coverage.

Lee’s greatest weapon was his knowledge of the game. You watched him play and just knew that he spent hours upon hours watching film of Joe Montana and Phil Simms. Then he went out and tried to walk, talk, act and lead like them. That would make most kids look stupid, but it made Lee better.

For my money, in fact, he was the best ever, in these parts, at what he did.

When a star dies, whether he’s 20 or 102, we’re left with little but anecdotes and statistics. Lee’s raw numbers, for what they’re worth, put him on national lists with the likes of Peyton Manning. He threw for 8,259 yards. Completed 63 percent of his passes. Captured two regional championships and one state title. Won the Fitzpatrick Trophy, emblematic of the state’s finest senior football player. Not bad, as they say, for a Maine kid.

Who among us hasn’t uttered that indictment of one of our own? And shame on us. Here in Maine, we have an inexplicable inferiority complex when a native even thinks about competing against others on a national spectrum. Worse yet, some of us ridiculously root for them to fail.

Like prophets, all-star athletes from Maine sometimes are without honor in their own hometown. Doubtless Lee was adored by the masses that gathered behind Winthrop High School to watch him play. There were a few, though, even in Winthrop, who doubted his skills and couldn’t wait to cackle that they told us so.

Lee heard them. It drove him to work harder. He lived to prove he could handle college life at the University of Maine, and later at Husson College. Be the giant fish in a larger pond.

If he felt slighted, though, he never showed it. That disarming smile never faded. Friends who crossed paths with Lee as recently as last weekend said he was smiling and joking. Same self-assured kid we always knew.

So hard to believe, and infinitely harder to accept.

Lee St. Hilaire left behind a loyal, close-knit family and an army of coaches, teammates and schoolmates who considered him a son or brother.

Seeing him grow, play and win was one of the purest joys of my career in sports. Hearing that he’s gone, the worst feeling imaginable.

We’re told not to get too close to our subjects because it might hurt our credibility. At the moment, that’s about the only thing that doesn’t seem to hurt.

Kalle Oakes is sports editor and can be reached by e-mail at koakes@sunjournal.com.

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