1) Roberto Clemente was killed 48 years ago today. He went down in a plane crash, lost at sea, his body never found. Athletes are called heroes endlessly and wrongly, but Clemente deserved the honor. He died selflessly at age 38, bringing aid to earthquake-ravaged Nicaragua.

2) Not long after sunrise on New Year's Day it became obvious that this was not just a routine search. From Isla Verde to Punta Maldonando, the shoreline near the San Juan airport was lined with people who had come to bear witness.

3) the two-lane roads leading to the water became more congested as the day progressed until by afternoon there was a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam of pilgrims flocking toward the place where their hero had fallen.

4) "That night on which Roberto Clemete left us physically, his immortality began," the Puerto Rican writer Elliott Castro later observed, and here on Pinones Beach was the first manifestation of the transformation from man to myth.

5) Although Gov. Luis Ferre, in his final day in office, had declared a 30-day mourning period, in effect acknowledging that Clemente was dead, many refused to believe it. The vast crowds at the beach were quiet, expectant. They waited for Roberto to come walking out of the sea.

6) Men carried portable radios, women brought infants; a shout, a sighting of color or shape, and suddenly a line of people were holding hands wading out to take a look. A Coast Guard helicopter landed at the beach and was swarmed by citizens at the false report of a body aboard.

7) Vera and her father-in-law, Melchor, returned to the beach and were treated as royalty as they sat in stoic silence. Vera wavered between holding on to the miracle that her husband was still alive and hoping the searchers would find some tangible evidence of his loss.

8) Manny Sanguillen, the Pirate catcher from Panama who adored Clemente like an older brother, showed up ready to do anything he could to help the search. He stripped down to his swimming suit and went out with a group of local divers searching the coral reef offshore.

9) It was not mythmaking but pure baseball that led Jack Lang's colleagues in the press to start calling his home on Long Island that night. "I'm way ahead of you. That's the first thing I thought of," he told one caller.

10) What Lang had already thought of was that the Baseball Writers of Association should take the extraordinary step of immediately inducting Clemente into the Hall of Fame. Foregoing the 5-year waiting period had happened only once, for Lou Gehrig.

11) Clemente had never been an easy case for baseball writers. For 18 seasons, he burned with resentment about being underappreciated and quoted in broken English by hacks who knew no Spanish.

12) His fury motivated him on the diamond, even as it confounded the men in the press box. Yet he was willing to admit when he was wrong, and was so much more earnest and committed than most ballplayers that by the end he had earned the respect of those he fought with the most.

13) Phil Musick wrote in the Pittsburgh Press: "I remember the first time I ever spoke to him, the day he shouted at me, the anger steaming out of those fierce black eyes and washing over me so that I could almost feel its heat."

14) Now, learning that Clemente was dead, Musick wrote: "I wished that sometime I had told him I thought he was a hell of a guy. Because he was, and now it's too late to tell him there were things he did on the fall field that made me wish I was Shakespeare."

15) By Three Kings Day, Jan. 6, a the end of a long bleak week, after his people had lined the Atlantic shore in expectation that Clemente would walk out of the sea, and thousands more made pilgrimages up the hillside to shuffle past his house like a shrine...

16) ...and the seers said he was alive but dazed, and Pittsburgh comrades arrived in Puerto Rico to show their grief and solidarity, and the U.S. Coast Guard, with all its boats and planes and divers and equipment, slowly dragged up wreckage and debris...

17)...at the end, finally, on a coral reef a mile east of Punta Maldonado, they found one sock, and Vera knew it was Roberto's. One sock, that's all, the rest to sharks and gods.