Key Connections: Star-spangled Banner, Baseball Forever Linked

Amid a lost season, the Rockies’ best pitcher and best position player carried Colorado to victory on Wednesday night in Oakland. Austin Gomber carved up the Athletics, throwing eight innings of one-run ball while continuing to look the part of Colorado’s ace. Then, Ryan McMahon — making a strong case for his first all-star nod — blasted the game-winning, two-run homer in the 12th for a 4-3 victory at the Oakland Coliseum. “(Gomber) was brilliant,” Rockies manager Bud Black told reporters.

COMMERCE CITY — Lily Boydstun shook off her pain and helped deliver a Class 5A state soccer championship to the Mountain Vista Golden Eagles on Wednesday night at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park. The senior midfielder left the game with 18:19 remaining due to leg cramps so severe she couldn’t stand. But after getting treatment on the bench, the Arkansas commit re-entered the game to deliver a perfect corner kick to junior Laney Erickson, who side-kicked in the only goal in Mountain Vista’s 1-0 victory over Rock Canyon. The Golden Eagles (18-0-1) captured their fifth title, their first since 2017. “We knew we had to put everything on the line for that goal, and we did,” Erickson said.

Peyton Manning and Bo Nix go back a while. Nix, the Broncos rookie quarterback, was still at Auburn in 2021 when he went to the Manning Passing Academy in Louisiana, a popular destination for college quarterbacks. The two kept in touch from there, including when Nix considered transferring from Auburn, where his dad, Pat, also played quarterback.

Deion Sanders figured he’d just bagged the second coming of himself. Cormani McClain figured he’d landed an instant starting spot and a seat at the table with the rest of Coach Prime’s Chosen Ones. Both guessed wrong. “Just knowing Coach Prime and (assistant) coach (Kevin) Mathis and knowing Cormani and the expectations, it was going to be rough in the beginning,” Samari Rolle, the former NFL defensive back and one of McClain’s old 7-on-7 coaches with the South Florida Express, told me recently. Coach Prime’s recruiting might have been changed by The Cormani McClain Saga.

On the heels of receiving his third career league MVP trophy, Nuggets center Nikola Jokic was unsurprisingly named First Team All-NBA for the 2023-24 season on Wednesday. Jokic has received All-NBA honors in six consecutive years, including four first-team appearances. He was on the second team last season despite finishing second in MVP voting — making him the last in a long tradition of awkward awards contradictions before the league’s new collective bargaining agreement established positionless All-NBA ballots. This is the first year that zero or multiple centers can appear on the First Team, Second Team or Third Team.

Last weekend, Abbey Glynn attended the prep state track and field meet at Jefferson County Stadium, and it became a trip down memory lane. The Colorado Buffaloes’ star wound up watching a few videos of herself from her time at Mead High School. “It’s crazy how far I’ve come,” she said. Now a fifth-year senior at CU, Glynn will compete in the NCAA West regional preliminaries in Fayetteville, Ark., on Thursday and Saturday.