BATON ROUGE, La. — She sent him a text by way of Snapchat that night, spelling out in rainbow lettering the reminder she shared almost daily: “Thank God for something.’’ She knew what she was thankful for; she was thankful for him — for a boy, an only child by his parents’ choice, who rewarded their doting and unconditional love with heaps of love in return. As a baby, they’d arrive to fetch him at daycare only to find that someone had scooped him up, taking him to their classroom or to the front desk because they loved having his happy face around. When he was a teenager, he carted a “Free Hugs” sign around a football tailgate. The goal might have been to steal a few embraces from pretty girls, but he willingly opened up his arms to anyone who offered, finding more grandmas excited to swallow him up than the coeds he’d hoped to charm.

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Even this year, as a grown man of 20, he shamelessly kissed his daddy hello and goodbye every time he saw him and would, on occasion, squeeze between his parents while they lay in bed, happy to snuggle even if his 6-6, 217-pound frame didn’t quite fit like it did when he was a boy. Back in August, he added one last tattoo to his collection, copying the ink his parents had worn since they married 24 years earlier, two hearts with a ribbon lacing between them. “The family tattoo,’’ a friend jokingly called it.

She didn’t expect to hear back from him that night but saw that he’d opened the Snap. That made her happy as she contentedly fell asleep. Fay Sims doesn’t remember the rest of Sept. 28 or much about the two weeks after. Her husband’s cell phone woke them, followed in short order by the ringing of the house phone. There was a frantic drive to Our Lady of the Lake Hospital, followed by the onslaught of doctors and nurses and teammates and friends.

And then there was nothing except an end so finite, Fay and Wayne Sims still aren’t quite sure how to go forward. “It’s like he was plucked from the Earth,’’ Fay whispers. Wayde Sims, Baton Rouge native and the doting son of an LSU Tiger, was supposed to start basketball practice at 6:30 that morning. He was supposed to lead an LSU team loaded with promising talent on a turnaround season. He was supposed to graduate one day and get a job and get married and give his parents grandchildren. He was supposed to grow up and have a life and live. “Now it’s like he’s never going to age,’’ Wayne Sims says. “I’ll always remember him as 20.’’

Wayde was shot and killed in the early hours of Sept. 28, gunned down during a fight outside a Subway restaurant near the Southern University campus. He’d been to a concert earlier and then a fraternity party. Another 20-year old, Dyteon Simpson, was arrested, and police say he confessed to the murder. “The hardest part? The hardest part is imagining a life without him,’’ Fay says. “I just don’t understand.’’

The clichéd narrative is that the Tigers will play this season for their teammate, that their strength and successes will buoy the family as it grapples with its grief. That hopeful story, however, carries with it an incredibly heavy burden for a team already dealing with plenty.

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LSU coach Will Wade signed the No. 5 recruiting class in the nation a year ago, a sentence not frequently tossed around Baton Rouge, at least not with basketball. The class consists of four ESPN top 100 players, including Ja’vonte Smart, the three-time Louisiana Mr. Basketball winner. The big haul, coupled with the return of All-SEC freshman guard Tremont Waters, landed the Tigers in the preseason top 25 and got tongues to wagging in town, where fans desperately want to root for the home team but are wary of getting burned yet again. From Pete Maravich to Shaquille O’Neal to Ben Simmons, LSU’s history is littered with big-name players and small-time results. Despite their own reluctance, fans bought in — all in — three years ago with the arrival of Simmons. The Tigers devolved from a preseason ranking of 21 to an 18-13 record with no postseason. A year later, LSU grad Johnny Jones was out as head coach.

It is that fool-me-once crowd that the current team runs into, these Tigers facing a near now or never scenario for Wade, even if he’s in just his second season. If this LSU team can’t make the tourney, he might want to plan an exit strategy. “Some of our fans, they’re wondering is this going to work out any better than that did,” Wade acknowledges. “More of them are 10 toes in this time, but we need to play well early to put to bed those fears so everyone is in.’’

More recently, the skepticism has been laced with a touch of cynicism, folks left to wonder just what it is they’re getting into. During last month’s federal trial, a defense attorney shared a transcript of a wiretapped call between Wade and agent/runner Christian Dawkins. On the call, Dawkins discusses a player “you would have funded,’’ referring to Balsa Koprivica. Wade responds, “OK. But there’s other (expletive) involved in it. I have got to shut my door … Here’s my thing: I can get you what you need, but it’s got to work.” Because the judge refused to admit the evidence into court, the snippet exists without context and remains subject to interpretation.

Still, although Koprivica, a high school senior, has yet to commit anywhere more than a few people have wondered if the alleged Louisiana purchase plan extended to the current crop of Tiger freshmen.  

At SEC media day, Wade said he had “never ever done any business with Christian Dawkins,’’ and pressed recently on the matter, he told The Athletic: “I can’t say anything more about that. I’ve been told not to. You care about what’s been said. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t care, but I can’t say much more. I addressed it with my team. I was honest with them, but I really can’t say anything more.’’ The LSU administration, adopting the stance taken at other schools mentioned in the trial, is standing by Wade.

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But with the recent news that the FBI has cleared the NCAA to start its investigations, the whole thing further muddies a narrative that is already heavy to bear.

They met … well, Skylar Mays isn’t entirely sure when they met. It was at the Sports Academy, the basketball program run by Collis Temple Sr. in Baton Rouge, when they were either six or seven. Mays does vividly remember three things: Wayde was taller than everyone else; he could dribble left but shoot right; and Mays wanted to be on his team. “I want to play with that guy,’’ he thought. A friendship blossomed, as many do between boys out of a shared love of sport. They were different. Mays is more of an introvert, the sort of kid who could sit contentedly and watch basketball for hours. Wayde was the energy in every room he entered, not so much a showboat as a beacon. People glommed onto him, to his easy-going kindness and the smile that never seemed to leave his face. Wayde loved basketball as much as the next kid, but the idea of sitting cooped up inside when he could be outside, fishing or crabbing with his dad, seemed silly.

Still, the two boys grew up in lockstep, the sort of friendship where my house is your house, your fridge is my fridge. After Wayde died, Mays realized he had a bunch of his best friend’s gear (shorts and T-shirts and such), their clothes, like their lives, still mixed together into one big heap. Mays took a temporary detour — he finished his high school career at Findlay Prep in Nevada while Wayde led the local team, University Lab School, to its third consecutive state title — but they knew they’d reconnect at LSU. “I could have told you Wayde was going to LSU when he was 14,’’ Skylar says with a smile.

Though he was born in Winter Park, Fla., Wayde moved to Baton Rouge when he was one. LSU games — football and basketball — served as family outings, Wayde doubly immersed in the university because of his home and his father. Wayne Sims played for the Tigers from 1988 to 1991, and his old teammates were like his son’s extra set of uncles. One, Stanley Roberts, became his godfather. As Wayde grew, they regaled him with stories, mixed in with life lessons, making sure the boy heeded his father’s advice. Not that Wayde would have done otherwise. He was devoted to his parents, equal parts mama’s boy and daddy’s buddy. He loved taking out the boat to go fishing with his father, or on chartered expeditions for redfish and speckled trout. When Fay went for a run up the levee, her son was as likely to be running alongside her as a girlfriend.

Wayde wasn’t perfect — he was suspended last year after he, along with two other teammates, appeared in a rap video, which showed the players drinking and smoking blunts — but he believed strongly in representing his family, choosing at a young age to wear his father’s number, 44. “He wore it well,’’ Mays says. “It meant something to him. He was proud to be his dad’s son. It was never a burden.’’

That connection is on proud display in the Sims garage, where a poster from Wayde’s senior day at University High hangs on the same wall as a framed picture of an old media guide cover from Wayne’s playing days. Wayne used his picture to explain to his son a favorite saying — “A lazy man don’t eat.’’ Apropos of the era, the media guide is done up in a theme, the players all sporting muscle tees and various sorts of construction gear. Wayne taught Wayde the difference between white-collar and blue-collar workers, telling his son there were far too many white-collar basketball players these days and not enough blue. Days before Wayde was killed, his coach heaped praise on his junior, impressed with his dedication. “Dependable,’’ Wade said of the player Wayde had become. “He wasn’t afraid of hard work.’’

On that same garage wall, just outside the door to the house, hang two bulletin boards, the cork all but covered with pictures and other trinkets. A purple student of the month ribbon hangs next to an LSU ticket on one, while on the other expired licenses are thumbtacked near an invitation to Wayde’s 13th birthday party. Fay unpins a note from Wayde’s fourth-grade teacher, thanking him for all he did for a wheelchair-bound student. “And MOST IMPORTANTLY, you make sure no one does him anything wrong,’’ it reads. Fay stares at it for a minute. “I have no idea why I even put that up there or when,’’ she says.

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Since the family moved into the house six years ago, Wayne has walked by those bulletin boards almost daily, usually without a glance. The other day he stared so long he was nearly late for work. “It’s almost like we got broke out of our routine, our everyday normal,’’ he says.

This is the struggle for everyone now, to rediscover normal. The quiet is creeping in, family and friends retreated back home, the planning for funerals and memorials officially over. That first awful night, the one where Wade’s phone rang at 12:57 a.m. — “I’ll never forget the time.’’ — is more than a month gone now. The details are seared in the coach’s mind, the frantic call from freshman Emmitt Williams who was calling from Smart’s phone as the two sped to the hospital upon hearing the news. The return to campus, bleary-eyed and dazed, the 4 a.m. jog he hoped would clear his mind, the meeting with athletic directors and counselors, the phone calls from other coaches who had been through similar tragedies — former Clemson coach Oliver Purnell, who lost a player while he was at Dayton, and ex-Vanderbilt football coach Bobby Johnson, whose star running back was murdered during a holiday break — and the planning for something you can’t, and shouldn’t, possibly plan for. “I remember staring at his locker,’’ says senior associate athletic director Robert Munson, who helped shepherd Wade and the team. “There are shoes and socks and his name. What do we do with that?’’ (It is exactly as it was.)

That Wayde was a hometown kid killed in his hometown made the grief circle even larger. Munson says he returned to his office on the morning after the murder to find staff workers in tears. “Some knew him from the time he was in diapers,’’ Munson says. “Others, their sons and daughters went to school with him.’’ Just the other day, a woman from Addis, the town across the Mississippi River, sent a note to Fay and Wayne. She didn’t know them, but Wayde, she wrote, was her favorite player. Along with notes, people have sent paintings and drawings, even pictures of the tattoos they’ve inked in Wayde’s memory. “He impacted so many people,’’ Wayne marvels. “We never realized.’’

Soon, however, all of that will slow to a trickle. Life marches on, even when you feel as if you’re standing in quicksand. The basketball season already is two games old, Wayde remembered with a patch on the Tigers’ jerseys. Everyone wants to do the right thing. Mays and Waters, in separate conversations, voice the same message — that they want to live more like Wayde, with a big smile on their face, and play in a way that would honor him — and Wayne and Fay want to support the Tigers and go to the games. But grief comes on like nausea, in waves and without warning. What the mind wants, the heart can’t necessarily follow. The Sims hope to be at the games but aren’t sure if they can handle being there. And Mays wants to live like his best friend would want him to, but he misses him so much it’s hard. “Some days you can’t help but cry,’’ Mays says.“And then you feel bad when you’re not crying.’’

A low-slung pillowed chair is tucked into one corner. A table filled with candles and readings sits across from it. On the small wall hangs yet another bulletin board, this one containing a picture, a silhouette of a child, another memento from Wayde’s childhood. “This is from when we turned him over to the Lord,’’ Fay says. “We knew then we were just borrowing him. We just thought it would be longer.’’

The space, Fay’s prayer closet, used to be Wayde’s closet, but when he went off to college she claimed the tiny cubby as her own sanctuary.

A faithful woman, Fay always spent a lot of time there. Now she visits frequently. “Thank God for something,’’ she tells herself. “Thank God for something.’’

(Top photo: Courtesy of LSU)