So Ryan, where does the story begin?

On a sweltering Sunday in July, a 14-year-old super fan of basketball walked through the mailbox with me, West Hartford, Connecticut.

He had 14 letters in his hand.

Each one of the letters had a very simple question that he wanted to ask some of the best basketball players and coaches in the world.

Can I have your autograph?

And what did you think was going to happen?

I thought absolutely nothing was going to happen.

At the time, mailboxes had become a political issue somehow.

The bubble were these foreign entities that we just didn't even know if mail was going to get in there.

So it just felt like a worthwhile exercise that got us some walking time

to the mailbox that was going to go nowhere. And what actually did happen? We did get a response.

And it was from the last person you'd ever expect.

It's a question athletes have been asked for decades.

Can I have your autograph?

But in recent years, the hunt for the autograph has been replaced with the quest for the selfie until this year.

Today, on the last day of 2020, hear the story of a 14-year-old superfan who wrote letters

to players and coaches in the basketball bubbles asking for their autograph.

You will never guess who wrote back. I'm Pablo Torre. It's Thursday, December 31st. This is ESPN

daily. Well, Ryan, thanks for joining me today. Glad to be here. Ryan Hockensmith is a writer for ESPN, and you can read his latest on the Grand Athlete Autograph Experiment on ESPN.com. So as a child of a certain age, Ryan, you had a goal. Your goal in life was to get athletes autographs and you had this particular method that you'd

use to try and get said autographs. What is it that you would do? Oh, I had so many techniques.

Where to begin? I'll pour out the playbook. But I wrote letters to athletes. I wrote the very

best letters I could. I had really

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