Three Thoughts is a new feature GoldandBlack.com will run every Monday morning in-season.

You know, to be a sportswriter is to stand still while the world — and people — just pass on by. You watch young men and women grow from high school kids as recruits to young adults as collegians to grown-up men and women over time. You watch coaches and staff come and go. If you're around long enough, as with any space in the world, people you've come to know over a long period of time, you watch them die.

It's like you're standing on the side of the road just watching the cars go by, all to different destinations and on different schedules, but moving along nonetheless.

When you cross paths with so many different people, at such a distinct cross-section of the world, you meet some you'll never forget.

Larry Clisby, who passed away this weekend following a battle with cancer, was one of those people.

I know it sounds terribly trite to say after someone dies, but trite isn't trite when trite is true. Larry was one of a kind, one of the most unique individuals any of us around here have known.

I think it would be easy for people outside Purdue to view Larry as something of a caricature, as "The Cliz," the voice on the radio, more so than the man himself. I can't claim to have been Larry's bestie or anything like that, but I did spend a lot of time around the man during the final few iterations of his life, and came to appreciate his wisdom and perspective as much as anything. To me, Larry and the Cliz were almost two different people.

Cliz was a showman, the raconteur who could work a room like few others, a man who was born to exist in front of a microphone or a camera or a live crowd.

Larry, the one I came to know better later in his life, was a thoughtful man, an inquisitive and self-reflective mind, a person absolutely void of the sort of pretense you'd expect from the showman that represented his other side. The Larry I came to know was quicker to tell you about his regrets than his accomplishments, of which there were many, and it was all of both that I think gave him such perspective on everything, perspective that I'm certain he held onto as he left this world as the best version of himself.

If you think you understand the magnitude of this loss for Purdue basketball, I'm here to tell that you don't. To Matt Painter, Elliot Bloom and others over there, Larry was de facto family. To those guys, he was part best friend, part cool uncle and maybe sometimes part doting father, I don't know. For a program built so much around its past, Larry was one of those constants, a bridge from one era to the next.

There may not be a radio play-by-play guy in the history of sports who's been closer to the people he worked with than Larry was. Not just the coaches, the players, too. And the rest of his radio team for certain.

During the NCAA Tournament, when they let us media wretches in the locker room, there is private space carved out for the coaches. You'd always see Larry in there with Purdue's staff, and the voice that often seemed to carry the most was that of the old head who called the games.

Inside Purdue's program, Larry was Boilermaker royalty.

Thing is, he never wielded that status.

At various times in his life, Larry could be a bit of a firebrand, but in my experience, he never big-timed anyone. He was a social being at heart, a true man of the people, so many of those people who felt heartsick this weekend as word of his death broke. It was a sad day, the loss of an American original, and a sad story, that Larry never got much of a retirement, never got a proper send-off from his role at Purdue — damn you, pandemic — and, far as I know, some of those who most would have wanted to didn't get to say good-bye in person.

Had Matt Painter gotten to see Larry off this weekend, I know what Larry would have told him. Simply: "Thank you."

That will be my defining memory of Larry Clisby: The gratitude.

He'd talk so often of how much he loved and appreciated Purdue and all Painter and Bloom and everyone did for him, maybe the managers who sometimes helped him around before or after games. You know, Painter got this job in his mid-30s, with one year of head coaching experience. Coaches that green don't always swing the biggest stick around their athletic departments. At that time, Purdue was ready to move on from Clisby. That was the battle Painter fought. Cliz stayed, and Larry never forgot.

This a program built on loyalty, long has been, and Painter's to Clisby was never in question and Clisby's to Painter, or Keady, or Purdue in general, certainly wasn't either.

I obviously wasn't around Larry during the past year — again, to hell with this pandemic for complicating the final year of the man's life — but I can tell you that the man I knew before the world stopped spinning was thankful. And so many he left behind thankful for having known him.