Let’s start with a sob story — one I recently told to the person who made me weep.

When I was in college, my girlfriend at the time surprised me with a box set of six DVDs of Cal Ripken Jr. highlights.

In the set was a career highlight reel along with five full-game broadcasts (you could fit only one game on one disc). It included, of course, Sept. 6, 1995, the night Cal broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games record and set a new standard: 2,131. It is a number every Orioles fan knows — a sacred number.

I don’t remember exactly what I said to my girlfriend. I probably muttered something about how wonderful and thoughtful it was. But I remember perfectly what happened in the next few seconds as I turned over the set in my hands: I cried.

These were not slow, cinematic tears cascading down my cheeks. These were heaving, wet wails. I lost my breath. I bent over at the waist and covered my face, unable to stop.

This lasted for a few minutes, until I regained a slim fragment of composure and dried my eyes as my girlfriend patted me on the back.

The episode remains, to this day, the most baffling, absurd reaction to a gift I’ve ever experienced in my life. Embarrassing? Absolutely.

Now imagine the flush in my face 17 or so years later, on the phone with Cal Ripken Jr., telling him how his DVDs made me cry.

“Wow,” Cal said, allowing a few seconds of silence on the other end of the line.

“I know,” I said. “I know it’s a lot.”

It is a lot. Sports can be a lot. Childhood heroes can be a lot.

And nothing — absolutely nothing — can make me feel the same way a lot of us did growing up, when we wanted nothing more than to be like the Iron Man.

*****

I was a 7-year-old boy in Ellicott City when Cal’s Streak eclipsed Gehrig’s. I honestly did not know that much about baseball — indeed, some people who read my columns might say I still don’t.

But I knew, for certain, one thing: Cal Ripken Jr. was the greatest baseball player to ever live. You could not have convinced me otherwise.

Babe Ruth? A fossil. Barry Bonds? Where even was San Francisco — a whole country away? Ken Griffey Jr. was the epitome of cool, no doubt, his backward ballcap inspiring a generation of would-be sluggers and their fashion statements.

But Cal was my guy.

It is impossible to overstate the titanic shadow Cal cast over the millennial generation of Maryland’s baseball-playing youth. Towering in the box, twirling a black bat and glinting his cobalt blue eyes at opposing pitchers like laser beams, he loomed godlike on the diamond and in our imaginations.

When I first played youth baseball, my league didn’t issue No. 8. The understanding we kids gleaned was that the players would knock out each other’s teeth for the right to wear Cal’s number. I went to Elrod Hendricks’ baseball camp at McDonogh because, as my parents told me, that guy coached Cal Ripken Jr. (the most famous Oriole who visited us, however, was Jesse Orosco).

Few of us threw sidearm, but we all made a go of it — because that’s how Cal threw the ball to first, with an easy flick.

I could not have wrapped my head around 2,131 or what it meant at the time. The Streak was six years older than I was. But, the way my parents and coaches described it, the Streak was a challenge that Cal issued to the rest of us. Go to school every day. Do your homework every night. Try hard at everything you do and be consistent.

And drink plenty of milk. Because this, too, was somehow important in the 1990s.

As if to burn the lessons into my soul, a life-size poster of Cal kept silent sentinel over my bedroom, reminding me to give my best every day. It also reminded me how much taller I had to grow before I was 6-foot-4 (I never reached it, but my height was far from the only reason my baseball career fizzled early).

The Cal Ripken Jr. in my head had power and mastery of his craft closer to the heavens than to Earth. If I had ever met the real Cal when I was a kid, that guy would have never held a candle to the mythical figure I had invented in my personal, imaginary lore.

No athlete has ever seemed as big, as all-encompassing as Cal Ripken Jr., before or since.

Then what happens to all children happened to me. I got older. I got cynical. I became guarded. I started to see the flaws in the heroes I worshipped.

Many of us follow this path. We can never love a sports hero quite as quickly, or deeply, as when we were young.

The DVD incident was years ago, so I can’t fully reconstruct what made me break down like I did. But I suspect that, at 20, I understood that the love I had for Cal Ripken was pure and innocent. And I understood that kind of admiration was something I would never feel as fervently again.

Something about that knowledge broke a dam inside me. Until that moment, I never realized how much I was holding back.

*****

I know Cal Ripken Jr. now. Not closely. Enough to give him a friendly nod, maybe exchange a few words when I catch him at a public event. I know him well enough to know how to set up an interview with him for a few minutes at a time.

Our relationship is business-oriented, primarily because he’s part of the ownership group of the team I cover professionally.

I grew up with abject loyalty to the Orioles. Now it is my job, at times, to rip them when I think they deserve it. Sometimes, that includes ownership, and by extension, Cal Ripken Jr. It’s funny how life works out.

Cal and I have never crossed lances in conversation, and maybe we never will. But it is always important to maintain a clinical distance from my childhood idol in the name of professionalism.

Except for one day this week. This Tuesday, it was my job to ask Cal about the Streak. It was my job to tease and coax memories about 1995 to the surface, including my own.

In the 30 years since 2131, Ripken has divorced and remarried. His kids, Rachel and Ryan — mere blond munchkins in 1995 — have their own careers and lives.

He has been a youth baseball mogul and a philanthropist, teaching the game but also opening STEM labs across the country (the latest at Harlem Park Elementary). The Single-A team Cal bought and moved to Aberdeen in 2002 is moving to Frederick next season following years of a fraught relationship with his hometown and Cal selling his stake.

In short — a lot has happened. At 65, Cal is as involved in this city as ever and still a mainstay in his seats behind home plate. Given his track record of showing up to things, I assume he’ll be a mainstay there for many more years.

It was jarring to attend one of Cal’s STEM lab openings last year at a middle school and realize that none of the children was alive for any part of Cal’s career. A baseball campaign that feels so visceral to me — that evoked a religious-level devotion for my generation — is now a collection of stats or highlights that kids today might look up for 30 seconds on an iPad.

Cal is a verifiable baseball legend, yet he joked to hundreds of tween students that they should ask their parents about his baseball career (many of them might not have been born when he won the World Series in 1983).

The latter stages of athletes’ lives are often spent reflecting on all the years that came before — but plenty of those chapters are fresh ground to till. It’s rare that we celebrate those latter chapters on a national broadcast, right up until we lose that sports hero forever. We mourn their passing and reflect on all they meant to us, and we say the things we wish we would have said when they were here.

Maybe we could tell them now. Maybe we should.

*****

The story I told Cal Ripken Jr. (who has given much of his precious time to interviewers in the last few weeks) was my embarrassing, years-old anecdote about crying over a DVD set. I told him I thought it was a story about sports heroes and the irrational things they make us feel.

Cal took just a few beats to process the childhood baggage I was laying on him.

“You know,” he said, “your feelings aren’t unlike mine growing up with Brooksy.”

Cal told me about his idol, Brooks Robinson — a sure-handed, affable third baseman who just happened to go to work with his dad. Cal admired how Brooks, who played all of his 23 seasons with the Orioles, picked off a grounder but even more so admired his grace with the fans and the blue-collar citizens of his adopted hometown. Cal Sr. told his sons to treat people the way Brooks treated people, and they tried.

It was startling to Cal when he realized that kids were starting to look up to him the way he looked up to Brooks. “It makes you watch your behavior. It’s a powerful thing.”

The peak of this idolization was when he approached Gehrig’s record. The Iron Horse was himself a legend, a powerhouse piece of the most famous lineup in baseball history. It gave Cal goose bumps to think he was challenging part of Gehrig’s legacy.

Breaking the record was not something Cal thought about much at first. When he was young, he wanted to hit the most home runs. He wanted the highest batting average. Playing every day mattered to him, but he never thought all those days would stack up to history.

Baseball needed a feel-good story coming out of the 1994 strike that canceled the World Series. The MLB latched on to Cal’s “pursuit” of Gehrig’s record. The hype leading up to the milestone suddenly made the Iron Man feel very, very vulnerable.

“People are starting to plan a celebration, and suddenly I’m thinking, ‘Man, what if I don’t get there?’” Cal said. “You can slide in a bag wrong. You can get hit by a pitch. You can pull a hammy. Boom. That’s it. That’s the way it goes.”

The most remarkable thing about the Streak — about 2,131, or about 2,632 or any juncture in those 16 years — isn’t that Cal was a superhero, or the deity that I created in my head.

Cal Ripken Jr. was, and always has been, just a man.

He’s never been immune to the ailments mortals feel. He knows what doubt and discouragement feel like. But he got lucky with his health, and he showed up to work every day. No one else in more than 100 years of baseball history has ever stuck with it like him.

To focus on the night of 2,131 — the fireworks, the red convertible riding around the outfield, the numbers coming down on the warehouse — is to miss the struggle. Across the 17 seasons of the full Streak, the Orioles went to the playoffs only three times. In 1988, Baltimore started on a historic 0-21 stretch, which included Cal seeing his own father get dismissed as the team’s manager.

Yeah, Cal told me, going to work was not always fun.

“We talk about the challenges of that, and baseball players like routines, having that constant,” he said. “For me, that routine enabled me to get 15 more games in a row after my dad got fired. There was a lot of soul searching going on at that time, like, ‘Is this worth it?’ I determined that it was, and I would come to the ballpark.”

Showing up for work was something his dad taught him. Being available gave consistency to the lineup. It injected zen into the clubhouse. He thought of it as a service to his teammates.

In the later days of the Streak, Ripken was surprised and even offended to learn some observers called him selfish for keeping it going well into his late 30s, when his prime had passed.

There is, however, one stretch he acknowledges was selfish. In 1997, he felt constant pain up his left leg. He quietly scheduled an MRI on his back for 3:30 a.m. at Johns Hopkins. The diagnosis? A slipped disc in his L4-L5 vertebrae (as someone who had back surgery for a similar problem in a similar area, I can attest this can be a debilitating, horrifically painful issue).

The doctor congratulated him on a great run of consecutive games but told him he would miss the next six weeks. There was one problem with that: The Orioles were in the hunt to win the AL East.

Ripken asked what kind of “permanent damage” he would risk if he continued to play.

“We’re the best team in the league, first place, right there in the middle of July — I don’t want to miss this,” Ripken said. “For the next six weeks, it was a miserable, challenging six weeks. But I didn’t want to miss being on the winning team. … If I’m honest, that was the time when I can admit I was super selfish.”

There was the game in Oakland in August of that year when a ground ball darted to Ripken’s left side at third base. He was stiff and off balance. He lunged clumsily at the ball, which dribbled past him.

After the humiliating error, Ripken found himself staring at the door behind home plate where all the umpires would enter and exit the field, fantasizing a quick getaway.

“I could picture myself walking into that little door and going out the steps,” he said. “I would have just gone and not said a word to anyone.”

The next inning, Cal led off. He pulled a breaking ball to left field, a base hit. The Streak continued.

Like every single day before it, since May 30, 1982, Cal had to choose to keep it going.

*****

It is striking to me that the final number of the Streak is not particularly special. It doesn’t end in a zero. It doesn’t have any memorable quality to it: 2,632.

It’s just the number of days Cal Ripken could play until he felt he couldn’t anymore. He ended it on his own terms, the most anyone could ever ask for in any line of work.

Cal operated with the understanding that he was someone’s hero. What Brooks Robinson meant to him, he meant to others. He knows what it is to have a childhood hero and for that hero to make him want to cry.

“Brooksy was my man,” Cal said at a public memorial after Robinson’s death. “And I’m sure that’s how most kids growing up in and around Baltimore felt.”

Although Cal often thought of himself as a guy who simply showed up to work, he tried to respect the nobility of being a role model — even if being a city’s hero sometimes felt like a bigger part than he would have chosen for himself.

“Over the years, you see that people have their own streaks, whatever they may be,” he said. “Maybe it’s hard to relate to a big home run hitter. If you stood in the batter’s box, you couldn’t do it. You can’t hit a home run.

“But everybody,” Cal said, “can show up.”

Cal has practiced his clichés, undoubtedly passed on by his fundamentals-obsessed father who drilled a generation of Orioles players himself. But here I really do think Cal means “everybody.”

When it comes to his record, which itself eclipsed a once unreachable star, I believe Cal would be happy to have company, because it would prove his thesis: Given the luck of the draw with health and enough consistency, anyone could, theoretically, replicate the Streak.

No one since Cal has come close. The active leader, Matt Olson, 31, would need to play at least 11 more seasons before he would reach Cal’s neighborhood.

Cal knows baseball is different now, and off days are a part of team strategy even for “everyday” players. But he wants to see someone make a run at it.

“Some people say they want their record to live forever, but I never was into that kind of thing,” Cal said. “At 65 years old, I think it would be cool to see somebody else do it. ... When you look at it, it seems insurmountable. But I know inside of me, if I can do it, somebody else can.”

Frankly, I don’t think we will see someone threaten the Streak in Cal’s lifetime. I doubt I will see it in mine. And I feel more protective of the record than Cal is. I would gladly see it live on for generations, etched in the record books like steel, never fading.

It has been 30 years since the dreamlike night of 2,131 in Baltimore — a night when grown-ups wept with pride and children believed gods walked the Earth and played baseball. I know now that the Iron Man was only ever just a man. I know now that nothing in sports will ever make me feel unbridled passion quite the same way as my first sports hero.

Still, it’s comforting to know some trace of that magic, that night and that love could live forever — long, long, long after the final out.