This is for the originals, I suppose, but everyone should follow along. Take a moment to salute Jack Bogaczyk, who retires today after a wonderful career as a reporter, columnist, sports editor and, more recently, literary gangster at Marshall.

Jack’s on the Tier 4 Mount Rushmore. He’s the one who scooped me up during a lousy time at a place where I used to work, and he set me up to do a lot of the things we do here now. Jack’s the one who taught me about the business side of sports, which, as you know, is where I make a lot of of my hay. Jack’s the one who helped me out so many times with a name, a number, an idea, an angle, a way over, under or through a wall.

And Jack’s the one who signed off on this blog. The Daily Mail had nothing like it when I asked for it and when he and I figured out how it would work.

I don’t know who or what I am, and I don’t know what others think about that, either, but I’d like to think I’m fair, informed and unaffected by what my words do. If that’s the case, then it’s largely because of what happened in December 2010 and June 2011.

I won’t go into it all again, but those were crazy times and they could have overwhelmed someone quite easily. I did not sink, and that’s because I watched this guy steered through chaos. It was model behavior. In the interest of brevity, I’ll just share what I said when Jack left the Daily Mail in 2012. It’s significant when you really think about it.

And though he was a great teacher and mentor, Jack was an even better sport. His attire, his wit, his appetite for enormous pizzas created the character JackBo here — and that created a spinoff! — and he never said a peep. He was probably pissed, not because fun was being had, but because people made a fuss over him.

He was old school cool, an endangered species on press row who wants only to sip his coffee, watch a game and tell a story. We need more, and today we have one less.

But no tears here. Only cheers. Enjoy the good life, Jack.