Sometimes you remember the little stories the best, the ones that fly beneath the radar of the Patriots in the Super Bowl, the Red Sox in the playoffs and the Celtics winning the NBA title. Here are three of them from 2008:

•PHIL WINSLOW

One beautiful spring afternoon I went to Mount St. Charles to talk to a lacrosse player named Phil Winslow, alerted to his story by his coach, Josh Fenton.

Winslow was 5 years old when his mother dropped him off at his aunt’s house in Providence, saying she’d be back to pick him up the next day.

She never did.

It was several years before he would see his mother again, and that was only fleetingly. By then he had become part of his aunt and uncle’s family. And somewhere along the way he came to know that his mother was a drug addict, and his father, whom he didn’t remember very well, was in jail.

That was the basic overview.

Beneath the surface was the story.

“I was shy and introverted,” Winslow said that day. “I bottled it all up inside. I always felt something was missing. I wanted to be like everyone else. So I basically isolated myself from people.”

As a sophomore, he began to play lacrosse. And from the beginning he loved it. Loved being on a team. Loved being a part of something that was bigger than himself. And he began to change, some of the walls he had built up starting to crumble. Sports always are more than just the wins and losses.

But it was an essay he wrote about his odyssey on his college application where it became evident that Winslow has come so very far from the kid who used to ask his aunt why his mother didn’t want him.

“With growing maturity, I accepted the fact that those questions may never be answered,” he wrote, “and that today, that devastated five-year-old is now a mature, employed, devoted young man.”

That essay, combined with an excellent academic record and his lacrosse skills, got him a scholarship to Clark University.

Still, he wrote about a lingering sadness, how “to this day, I am still waiting for my mother to come by and pick me up from my sleepover. I often have dreams about that day. I freeze when I go to the door thinking of my mother standing there on the porch.”

•ROCCO BALDELLI

It was last October and I was standing on the field at Fenway Park with Baldelli before a Red Sox–Tampa Bay playoff game.

We talked for a minute or so, nothing serious.

And all I could think of was the day eight years earlier when I first had met him. It had been at the Mickey Stevens Complex in Warwick, on one of those cold, blustery days that make you hate high school baseball around here. The word was already out on him then, and in less than two months he would be the sixth pick in the June draft, his life irrevocably changed.

That was still ahead of him then, and that’s what’s so easy to overlook. We often tend to think that professional athletes were all but parachuted into their sport, tend to forget that all have journeys, ones that begin in a far different place from where they end up. Baldelli’s certainly did, for it’s a long way from Cumberland to the major leagues.

People are forever assuming that I like being a sports writer because I get to go to a lot of games. I like being a sports writer because I have come to learn that it’s a privilege to hear someone’s story and be able to write about it.

Baldelli’s is one of them.

•MARK MacDONALD

In the Brown basketball media guide, there was this question: “What person in history would I most like to meet?”

For four years, MacDonald always said his mother. The woman whose picture is on the table next to his bed. The woman he’s heard countless stories about. The woman he never knew.

MacDonald’s mother died of an aneurysm shortly after giving birth to him. He grew up an only child, and sports were the life raft, something he and his father could share, something he could use to help fill the emptiness in his life. He became a high school basketball star in Lexington, Mass., a 6-foot-9 kid who could shoot.

We talked one day in the spring, for a story that would come out on Mother’s Day, and what made the conversation even more emotional was that I once had known his mother when I was in high school in Barrington.

He said how one of the reasons he had decided on Brown was that two of his mother’s sisters lived in the area, and that he wanted to be closer to that side of the family. And if in a perfect world he would have come here and starred, that never happened. He played for two coaches, he was hurt a lot, and he had come to see how basketball could be a metaphor for life: that sometimes you can work hard and not have your dreams come true.

Or maybe they come true in a different way.

For he’s come to feel closer to his two aunts and his four cousins who lived here, and in that sense he’s come to feel closer to his mother, too.

His mother, whom he carries in his heart, whether it’s Mother’s Day or not.

breynold@projo.com