Pretty soon, I’m just going to stop reading the paper during August.

Seventeen years, most of them spent frolicking in the fun-and-games department, and I can tell you that almost without fail the eighth month is the cruelest month.

It never ceases to remind us that life is larger than the trifling numbers on a scoreboard but is, indeed, governed by a clock we can’t see.

Heather Johnson died in a car accident Sunday morning. It made me sick when I read the headline, saw the picture and put two and two together. I’ll be sick when classes commence at Jay High School and the University of Maine in a week; sicker still when thousands gather at the state basketball tournament next February.

She’ll be felt, but not seen, at all those rites of passage, and like hundreds who knew Heather and thousands who knew of her, I fail to make sense of it on any level.

Don’t get me wrong. Each second of everyone’s life is precious, but it feels like we’ve been forced to mourn too many of our best and brightest during summer’s last hurrah.

Tuesday’s front-page coverage of Heather’s tragedy brought back memories of Mark Blanchette, Travis Van Durme and an array of other shining lights extinguished far too soon.

We’ve had plenty of practice. It never gets easier.

Young ladies like Heather Johnson are the reason I can look anyone in the eye and affirm that I’d rather cover one year of high school athletics here in the Maine foothills than a lifetime of Super Bowls.

Heather’s passion, persistence and determination are the stuff that made me fall in love with sports in the first place.

She had the smile and smarts to become a millionaire in this life, without question, but those riches wouldn’t have been a consequence of her time in the 40-yard dash or ability to finish a fast break. Still, there is a generation of budding athletes playing Area Youth Sports in Jay and Livermore Falls who hopefully learned more by watching and listening to Heather Johnson than Johnny Damon or Tom Brady ever will teach them.

On the surface, Heather’s high school sports career was four years of might-have-been. Plagued by catastrophic knee injuries that have sidelined so many female athletes, she had every right to put field hockey and basketball on the shelf. The consummate straight-A student, Heather could have traded her sports captaincy for leadership on any academic team.

But quitting and early retirement were unacceptable, even laughable to Heather. She endured surgeries and countless hours of rehabilitation that might have persuaded guys infinitely bigger and tougher than I never to watch sports again, let alone play.

Play, she did. Heather wasn’t the star of Jay’s basketball team in her senior season of 2003-04, but she was a central figure in rallying the Tigers from the cellar of the Mountain Valley Conference to the spotlight of championship week at Augusta Civic Center. Her toughness, defensive skill and mere presence helped Jay push Dirigo to overtime in a semifinal game and nearly obliterated that 11-year winning streak we tournament geeks love to chirp about.

Most recently, athletics had taken a back seat to architecture in Heather’s world. She was going to be a sophomore in Orono.

August is an understandably dangerous month. My teenage years are long elapsed, and I still drive faster, play harder and blast the radio louder now than at any other stop on the calendar.

So many highway tragedies have taught us so many lessons. We may never know what led to Heather’s sudden death, and in the grand scheme of things there are far more important details for us survivors to ponder.

For instance, I’ll hug my wife and son a little tighter when I get home from work tonight, as if I should have needed a reminder. And next time I cover a game in which a kid wearing an unwieldy knee brace makes a pretty pass, draws a timely foul or creates crucial defensive havoc, hopefully I’ll have the sense to interview him or her instead of taking the easy way out and quizzing the person who scored all the points.

When I’m done, maybe I’ll even shake the youngster’s hand and mumble a word of thanks for teaching me an important lesson. They’ll probably look at me like I need counseling, but that’s OK.

You’ll be missed, Heather, but you’ll be reflected in the smiling eyes of every unsung sports hero I’m blessed to watch until my own time is up.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His e-mail is [email protected].