The first time I saw a LeRoy Neiman painting was in a television commercial. Of this, I am sure, even if I cannot remember the portrait being advertised or how much it was being sold for or even why it was being hawked on cable at that particular moment. It may have been a rendering of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, and I may have seen the ad during an episode of Roy Firestone’s Up Close, or I may be conflating my memories, since I believe Neiman often appeared on ESPN during the network’s Australian Rules Football epoch.

Neiman, who died this week at the age of 91, was the most successful sports portraitist of his era, in part because he was the only noted sports portraitist of his era. He was prolific and wildly rich (in a 1985 Sports Illustrated profile, Franz Lidz estimated that Neiman grossed more than $10 million a year — his painting of the 1975 Kentucky Derby was priced at $500,000) and critically reviled. He “makes art for people who don’t like art,” one critic said; “What Howard Johnson’s is to the taste buds, LeRoy Neiman is to the eyes,” a magazine designer said. His paintings are brightly colored and impressionistic and easily appreciated by the masses of Americans who are not patrons of the Metropolitan Museum and who think Mark Rothko was great in The Avengers. His work is as ubiquitous on the bathroom walls of Midwestern sports bars as Monet’s water lilies are on the walls of women’s dorms at East Coast universities.

In today’s NFL, there's a feeling of impermanence surrounding even the best running backs. The value of the position has diminished to the point that teams that draft backs too high or dole out massive contracts are questioned for it, and the thing is, those questions have some merit. The New York Giants won a Super Bowl in February with the league’s worst rushing offense. Two of the league’s best five backs will be coming back from torn ACLs this season. Another took home $30 million guaranteed last offseason before falling off the face of the earth. With every 5,000-yard passer and every running back by committee, there’s an increased fragility in the lifespan of truly dominant backs. That’s why today, as LaDainian Tomlinson ends an unbelievable 11-year career, it feels like an era is ending with it.

It was the spring of 1997, and fans of rock'em sock'em hockey were getting all kinds of fired up. The Red Wings were set to face the Flyers in the Stanley Cup finals, and the series' defining matchup was both brutal and brutally obvious: Detroit's Vladimir Konstantinov had to be the one to counter Philadelphia's Eric Lindros.

The thought of seeing Konstantinov versus Lindros — the Russian defenseman with hits so powerful he was known as Vlad the Impaler against the superstar so bull-in-a-china-shop thunderous that he played on a line nicknamed "The Legion of Doom" — was enough to make even the most hot-blooded shiver. (Also, we need to step it up these days with our hockey nicknames.)

But Red Wings coach Scotty Bowman had his own ideas. Rather than fighting fire with fire, he chose to deprive it of oxygen. And so rather than go with Konstantinov, he opted for Nicklas Lidstrom.

They lost their damn minds. All of them.

Gary Carter's over the moon, of course. He's just whacked a double over Andre Dawson's head to snap a scoreless tie against the Cubs. The last at-bat of Carter's great career, and he hits a game-winner. The rest of the Expos are also thrilled, predictably.

But the most striking protagonists are the fans. There are 41,802 of them, blowing the roof off Olympic Stadium. It had been an exciting season in Montreal, at least by Expos standards. The team had already been eliminated, though, and Expos fans had shown a tendency to stay away when they had no reason to cheer. Two years earlier, the Expos played their final home game in front of 4,262 die-hards. The year after that, they spent the end of the season on the road, chased from the disintegrating Big O by falling concrete beams.

Not now. Where once there was apathy, now there was bliss.

When the gloriously mulleted and barely 18 years old Mike Modano was drafted no. 1 overall by the Minnesota North Stars in the 1988 NHL Draft, he was so nervous that he stood on stage clutching his new no. 9 jersey in his, as he described them, "clammy and sweaty" hands.

"Put your sweater on!" he was quickly exorted. "Be proud, kid!"

He did, gladly, though that North Stars jersey would not be around for too long. In 1993, two years after the North Stars reached the Stanley Cup Finals with the help of young Modano's 20 playoff points, the team was relocated to Dallas as part of the NHL's push to move hockey beyond the sport's traditional hotbeds.

North Stars owner Norman Green later recalled that he was encouraged to make the move to Dallas by "the only Texan I knew: Roger Staubach." This was apt, both because of Dallas' status as a football-first city and because Modano, the Stars' biggest star, was the closest hockey had to an archetypal All-American quarterback.