There are times in life when you just want to reset the clock. Turn it back, change something, anything.

What do you say to a father whose son was one of the bright lights in your own profession, a young man with a new baby and a great future who suddenly lies still in a snowy field in Colorado? How do you reach out to a colleague who watched the same young man pack his computer, his game notes, his media guides and his bags and head off to the airport on Friday?

While the world waited to celebrate the Super Bowl, those of us in college athletics, particularly those in the family of the Big 12 Conference, cried a lot on January 27.

Throughout America, college basketball teams traveled that Saturday. They played their games, got on buses and airplanes, and headed home. Oklahoma State should have been no different. A tough loss to Colorado behind them, in a couple of hours they would be home in Stillwater with their three planes carrying their team and support staff. Problem was, one of the planes didn't make it back.

An experienced team of investigators will determine what went wrong. The logic in us will appreciate that. The emotion will still cry.

Almost every phase of a college team was represented on that plane. There were players, a manager, an athletic trainer, a radio announcer, a radio engineer, the basketball operations chief who is the coaches' right-hand man, and a sports information director.

And he was my friend.

Will Hancock was 31 years old. He was an SID.

There are 1,800 dues-paying members of CoSIDA, the national organization of college sports information directors. These are the men and women who often labor behind the scenes, always dedicated to telling the good things about their athletes, their coaches and their program. All of us have ridden where Will was January 27. He might have even had his laptop out, getting ready to update the statistics so he could steal a few extra moments at home before he went in Sunday to update his release and get ready for the next game.

Will was like other SIDs in some ways, yet he was unique in others. He was a second generation SID. His dad, Bill Hancock, had started in this profession as an assistant at the University of Oklahoma. That's where we met 30 years ago. Bill would go on to his present job with the NCAA, where he basically runs the Division I Men's Basketball Championship, the madness called March that runs to the Final Four. He got the job because he is competent, fair, honest and a genuinely nice person who operated with supreme class. So is his wife, and so was Will.

That was the phone call I had to make Sunday, to tell Bill Hancock there was really nothing I could say. It did not surprise me that he was worried about his other son, who was on his way to Stillwater from the Northeast.

Several months ago, the sports information profession lost one of its giants, a kind man named Bob Bradley. Semi-retired, Bob was in his 70s. He had seen more than 500 straight Clemson football games before succumbing to a variety of diseases that took him from us. That was sad.

This was tragic.

Will Hancock and those who died with him were, for the most part, young -- with the whole world in front of them.

So, along with everybody who knew him and them and even those who didn't, I have struggled to find meaning -- any meaning -- in this.

It would be nice to think these deaths will mean something, that we will learn something from this. But teams will have to travel. It's been more than 20 years since the Evansville basketball team and the Marshall and Wichita State football teams went down in plane crashes. Our travel patterns changed back then, erring on the side of caution, and in time, we moved on. Men's and women's teams face high costs and tough class schedules, and getting to and from games expediently became the rule.

Maybe we will learn that nobody was at fault here -- that this one will be simply a bad deal of the cards, a fact of nature that defied human creations and jolted us to reality.

For whatever reason, the word "fair" isn't coming to me just now.

The morning of January 28, I sought some help from Gerald Mann, who is "The Preacher" to Darrell Royal and 9,000 others at Riverbend Church in Austin. He was preaching about grief, and he was preaching to me.

"The only way to deal with grief," he said, "is to replace it with gratitude."

Several years ago, a young neighbor of mine named Matthew was preparing for school. The honor student at the Christian school went into the bathroom to brush his teeth, and he never came out. His Dad found him on the floor 15 minutes later. He was dead. No one ever knew why. His heart just stopped, and he was gone.

I will always remember what his dad said to me that night as we all tried to help. "Go home and hug your kids," said Matthew's dad.

I had hoped all night that I would find that Will Hancock was not aboard that ill-fated plane lying broken in Colorado. The morning paper broke my heart.

I thought of Bill and Nicki, and called DeLoss and Mary Ann Dodds, who had worked with Bill in the Big Eight Conference office when Will was just a boy.

And then I remembered Matthew's dad. I wanted to find Scott McConnell, who does basketball for our SID office, and hug him. I wanted to tell Dan Ahearn, the man who handles basketball operations for Rick Barnes, how much I appreciate him. And I wanted to find my sons and daughter, and hug them.

That's the gratitude that Preacher was talking about. Sure, I am thankful that Will Hancock represented our profession so well, and I am grateful that I had a chance, though ever too brief, to know such a fine man.

But the only thing we can take from this that will mean something is to tell those we love and those we work with how much they matter.

And do it today, because tomorrow may never come.

Bill Little is assistant director of athletics at the University of Texas at Austin.

Thank you for support

-- Bill, Nicki, Karen and Nate Hancock