Running off at the typewriter. …

National Coaches Day came and went earlier this week, and it got me to thinking about the men who helped raise me.

Yes, raise me.

Because when you grow up like I did — a fatherless kid in a single-parent home — sometimes the man wearing too-tight polyester coaching shorts with the whistle around his neck and coffee on his breath becomes more than the guy who teaches you how to tackle or hit a cutoff man. Sometimes Coach becomes Dad. Not officially, of course. But close enough.

Our coaches taught us discipline. They taught us toughness. They taught us to show up on time, work hard, quit making excuses and finish what we started. And sometimes they simply made sure we got home.

I’ve written before about one of my old high school coaches, Dave Branch, who would finish practice, pile a bunch of us fatherless boys into his beat-up Ford Falcon and drive 20 miles out of his way to take us home. His gas. His money. His time.

We once figured out that, counting all the hours Coach Branch, Coach Feltner and all the others put into organizing practices, watching film, mowing fields, painting fences, driving buses and doing everything else, they probably made about 30 cents an hour.

Thirty cents.

And we thought we were the ones making sacrifices.

I remember the story that haunts me even now. Before baseball practice one afternoon, Coach Branch and his wife were having an argument right in front of the field.

“Why don’t you spend more time with your kid and less time with these kids?” she screamed.

You want to talk about a brutal, blind-side hit.

When I was young, I didn’t fully understand the magnitude of that sentence, but I do now.

Years later, I told the late Corky Rogers — the legendary high school football coach from Jacksonville — the story about Coach Branch and his wife.

Corky winced.

“That story makes me cringe because we’ve all been guilty of it,” he told me. “It’s a hazard of the coaching profession.”

Think about that. The very thing that makes great coaches special — the willingness to give so much of themselves to other people’s children — can also exact a terrible price.

They miss dinners. They miss weekends. They miss dance recitals. They spend their own money. They burn their own gas. They worry about kids who aren’t their own and, often, love them as if they are.

And for what?

Certainly not the paycheck.

Maybe my lifelong friend Robby Pruitt has the answer.

Robby has won seven state championships and became the first high school football coach in history to win 200 games in two different states. But when I asked him about coaching his coaching accomplishments for a column a couple of years ago, he didn’t talk about trophies, rings or record books.

“You know, that’s the best part of this job,” Robby told me. “The wins are nice, but the best part is hearing from players years later. I’ve had hundreds of texts and calls from guys I coached — now they’re successful men, husbands and fathers — telling me the impact football and our time together had on them. That’s what really matters.”

That’s it.

That’s the scoreboard that matters.

Not 49-21. Not 10-0. Not seven state championships or 400 victories.

It’s the 45-year-old former player who calls and says, “Coach, I finally understand what you were trying to teach me.” It’s the successful businessman who still hears his coach’s voice when life gets hard. It’s the husband who learned commitment, the father who learned responsibility, the man who learned as a boy that when you get knocked down, you get your ass back up.

Coach Branch died years ago at 51.

I never properly thanked him.

Never thanked him for the rides home. Never thanked him for the lectures about pride and hustle that we used to mock behind his back. Never thanked him for caring about a bunch of knuckleheaded kids enough to give us something we didn’t even know we needed.

Himself.

So, yes, National Coaches Day was earlier this week. But one day isn’t enough.

Not for the softball coach hauling equipment in her minivan. Not for the football coach unlocking the weight room before sunrise. Not for the men and women who teach our children that character still counts.

Find your old coach. Call him. Text her. Tell them what Robby’s former players tell him.

Tell them they mattered.

Because long after the stadium lights go dark, the uniforms are packed away and nobody remembers the final score, one title remains:

Coach.

If you ask me, there is no more honorable name in the world.

SHORT STUFF: The Gators went to Missouri last week hoping to make another statement. Unfortunately, the only statement they made was, “Please stop scoring on us!” As far as I could tell the Gators weren’t playing defense against Mizzou, they were providing directions. … I still can’t believe Florida State pounded Virginia 38-7 last week. Somewhere, Virginia’s founder, Thomas Jefferson, was probably on some heavenly message board, posting: “Sheesh, I haven’t seen so much ground being given up since I was negotiating the Louisiana Purchase.” …

Forget the Super Bowl. Florida’s got the Bucs and Dolphins, who are a combined 0-8. Welcome to the Stupor Bowl, where the winner gets its first win and the loser gets the first draft pick. These two state teams are so bad that  even the Florida Lottery has a better chance of producing a winner. … Three things that have jumped the shark: (1) Podcasts. (2) $9 cups of coffee. (3) Fake AI videos of Donald Trump wrestling an alligator. …

I’m not saying the UCF football team has been decimated by injuries, but the Knights have so many players hurt right now that the depth chart should come with a co-pay. … Incredibly, there’s now serious debate over exactly what ESPN’s Holly Rowe meant when she said Miami’s Malachi Toney was hugging Clemson coach Dabo Swinney “‘mid-interview” before her post-game chat with Toney after the Hurricanes’ victory over Clemson. Sadly, the Zapruder film has officially been bumped to the second-most analyzed 13 seconds of video in American history. …

Did you see New England receiver Efton Chism’s leaping, one-handed ⁠23-yard TD ​catch in the victory over the Bills last week? Great catch, but still not as good as UCF’s J.J. Worton’s one-handed, 30-yard TD catch against Temple in 2013. … The L.A. Chargers hired former Dolphins head coach Mike McDaniel as offensive coordinator to unlock Justin Herbert. Four games into the season, the Chargers are already looking for the locksmith. …

Mikey likes: FSU over Louisville by 5 in Upset Special, Oklahoma State over UCF by 11, Florida over South Carolina by 10, Cowboys over the Bucs by 12, Jags over the Eagles by 10, Bengals over the Dolphins by 9. … Fox News over CNN by 10 – although CNN has the exact same score with the teams reversed.

Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on social media @BianchiWrites and listen to my radio show “Game On” every weekday from 3 to 6 p.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and 969TheGame.com/listen.