Scott Radley: How do you wrap your head around a former Hamilton high school teammate signing a $172-million NBA contract? By being happy for him.
They're just boys in the photo. The one in which the broadly smiling barely-teenagers are flashing their No. 1 finger to show they're the city high school midget basketball champions of 2013.
At that moment, neither of the two Grade Niners sitting side-by-side in the front row of the St. Thomas More team picture had the faintest inkling that eight years later one of them would be signing a $172-million US deal in the NBA.
It's literally mind blowing," Connor McGauchie says.
He's not the signer.
That would be Shai Gilgeous-Alexander who put pen to paper last week to commit himself to the Oklahoma City Thunder for the next five years in exchange for what works out to $215 million in loonies. Which is about $85 million more than what all this area's active NHL players have made in their entire careers so far. Combined. And makes him Hamilton's highest-paid athlete ever by far - and one of its richest people - overnight.
It's crazy to see," McGauchie says.
Talking to the 22-year-old, it's clear he's not jealous. Amazed? Yes. Blown away? Absolutely. Stunned? Who wouldn't be. But not envious.
That said, it's such an extraordinary amount of money that the City of Hamilton paramedic logistics worker can't really fathom it. Who among us could?
A Lamborghini costs about $350,000. Gilgeous-Alexander could buy 614 of them. The most-expensive home in Hamilton (the mansion on Garner Road in Ancaster) is up for sale for $49 million. He could buy four of them.
Tim Hortons Field cost $145 million. He could've paid for that and had enough left over to cover all the salaries of every player in the CFL this year and still had more than $20 million in spending money left over.
Oh, and the value of the deal could reportedly rise to $207 million US - $259 million Canadian - if the guy often referred to as SGA is voted to an all-NBA team during the five years. A quarter of a billion dollars.
It's impossible not to be wowed by that sum but with or without it, McGauchie thinks it's amazingly cool that he was once a teammate of a guy who's become a huge star in the NBA.
Back in those early high school days when he was a six-foot-tall forward, Gilgeous-Alexander was a small, skinny kid who's publicly said he was terrible at that age. That may be an overly critical self-assessment but what we know for sure was that the future pro was playing on this squad because he hadn't made the junior team. So he clearly wasn't great yet.
McGauchie recalls him still being pretty darn good.
He carried us to a championship," he says.
Even so, nobody thought the kid with the oversized feet was destined for the NBA. Even at that age they understood stuff like that doesn't happen. Maybe he'd become a high school phenom. If things went well, perhaps he'd make a Canadian university team.
Following that school year, Gilgeous-Alexander transferred to Sir Allan MacNab. Then for Grade 11 he headed to a prep school south of the border. Where the previously undersized teen sprouted to 6-foot-6. And where he turned into a star.
McGauchie didn't really hear about his old teammate again until he read something about him signing with the University of Florida. Then changing his mind and heading to the basketball hotbed of Kentucky.
Holy crap," he remembers thinking.
He's followed the journey every step since then. The college career. The starring role in March Madness. The 11th-overall pick in the 2018 NBA draft. The great rookie season. The trade from the Los Angeles Clippers to Oklahoma City. And now this.
McGauchie doesn't often broadcast that he was once a teammate of SGA. No need to drop names, he says. Even if he did, there would be no shame in that.
You can be sure a few people mentioned their one-time connections to Darnell Nurse or John Levy last week when the former signed a $74-million deal with the Edmonton Oilers and the latter's app - Score Media which focuses on betting and is one of the top-read digital sports sites in North America - was sold for $2 billion. And you know many people have talked over the years about their connection to Dave Andreychuk or Kia Nurse or Martin Short or anyone else who's made it huge.
We're happy for the guy," McGauchie says of Gilgeous-Alexander. I don't have any kind of jealousy. It's just nice to see the person who put in the work and had the dedication get there."
And that championship team photo in which he's sitting next to the future Thunder star? He remembers it.
In fact, he's pretty sure it's still on his phone.
Scott Radley is a Hamilton-based columnist at The Spectator. Reach him via email: sradley@thespec.com