CLEVELAND — There’s a tangled web of an intersection in University Heights where Silsby Road, S. Belvoir Road and Wrenford Road converge in headache-inducing fashion. Long before I was born, an officer cited my dad for not stopping at a stop sign at the labyrinth. (My mom assures me he stopped.)

My dad, more irked by the injustice than the $75 fine, decided to fight the ticket. His court date fell during their honeymoon in Acapulco, so he called to reschedule. They said they’d get back to him, but they never did.

Two and a half years passed.

I was 6 months old, asleep upstairs on a Saturday afternoon. My mom wasn’t home. The doorbell rang. My dad opened the door to find a police officer and a bail bondsman, who said they were at our residence to arrest him and take him to jail.

There was a warrant out for his arrest for neglecting the ticket about which he had long forgotten. He could hand over $250 in cash and they would scurry off to their next appointment. Otherwise, he was headed for handcuffs.

“Can I put on a shirt?” he asked.

The bail bondsman accompanied him upstairs to ensure he didn’t slip out some trap door and vanish. My dad knocked on the front door of a neighbor’s home. They were close and my dad employed a dry, matter-of-fact wit, so he led with: “I’m being arrested. Do you have any cash so I don’t have to go to jail?” They laughed and loaned him the money. I kept sleeping.

I don’t have many stories about my father, but that one stands out. I can imagine him being exasperated and defensive and also refusing to resist the urge to crack a joke amid the nervous tension because, well, that’s precisely what I would do.

I do remember a Sunday afternoon in June 1996, playing catch with my dad in the front yard and then taking batting practice against his tosses with a small, skinny, blue wooden bat. My mom watched from the front porch as she held my 2-month-old sister. When we finished our round, my dad scaled the steep driveway. My mom noticed the solemn look on his face.

“I don’t have a lot of feeling in my right arm,” he told her.

She immediately assumed the worst. After all, they had been conditioned for it.

Three years earlier, my dad visited a doctor to cure an unrelenting bout of poison ivy. He mentioned his headaches to the doctor and detailed how they were growing more frequent and painful. They sent him for a CT scan, which revealed a brain tumor. Suddenly, an itchy leg didn’t seem too intrusive. He underwent an eight-hour brain surgery a few days later.

The doctor exited the operating room, located my mom and told her, bluntly: “It’s cancer. Don’t shoot the messenger.”

After the operation, he donned a shirt with a picture of the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. The back of the shirt read: “If only I had a brain.”

“There was always humor,” my mom says. “It softens the blow.”

He received eight weeks of radiation treatments, but after a few months, aside from some memory deficits, he started to feel like himself again. They were cautioned, though, that the cancer could one day return. One doctor suggested he might not be around to meet his grandchildren.

That wound up being the case. But that doesn’t mean this story can’t have a happy ending.

My dad passed away 25 years ago this month. Most of the memories I have of my dad are of him lying in a bed in the living room in the waning days of his life, of his friends and relatives celebrating his 40th birthday in an adjacent room as he slept. I do remember Saturday morning drives along I-480, Three Dog Night blaring as we cruised toward our weekly bowling league outing. I remember sitting in the stands at Cleveland Stadium with him for a Browns game in 1995, shortly before Art Modell ripped the team from the city’s grasp.

He really treasured the Indians, who captured his beloved hometown’s attention in the late stages of his life. He loved baseball, and he never missed my T-ball or coach-pitch games when he was physically able to attend. And, of course, when he had the strength and energy, we played catch in that front yard, out of the way of the two massive maple trees, one of us standing on the sidewalk and the other up the slope in the front grass.

After his arm felt funny that afternoon in 1996, my dad underwent a PET scan and an MRI to determine if he had a new tumor or some meddlesome scar tissue. The doctors determined it was scar tissue. To celebrate, we joined another family in Niagara Falls for a late-summer getaway.

But shortly after we returned, my dad started to decline. By late September, he could no longer drive. By Thanksgiving, he was in hospice care. The first brain tumor he had, three years earlier, was a Grade 2 Astrocytoma (hence the name of our first family dog, Astro). The second tumor was a Grade 4 glioblastoma, and it was inoperable.

Twenty-five years later, I’m blessed to be able to create new memories. I became a father on Tuesday. When the first-day frenzy quelled a bit — and I finally listened to my wife, who demanded I quit cracking jokes that triggered pain in her core — I flipped on the Guardians game.

As Charlie rested in my arms, the first full at-bat we watched together (OK, he was actually just trying to stick his fingers in his eye) was Owen Miller’s game-tying two-run homer in the ninth inning.

… and then the Guardians lost in extra innings. Welcome to Cleveland sports, kid. They’ll make you yank the hair from the soft spot on your tiny head.

Growing up, the father and son next door played catch every day, with a football during the fall and winter and with a couple of gloves and a baseball the instant the snow melted in the spring. Some of my favorite stories I’ve written have chronicled those sorts of bonds. Cleveland GM Mike Chernoff and his father have met for a game of catch, every month, for more than 30 years, despite several states, hectic jobs, Mother Nature and a pandemic attempting to interfere. Francisco Lindor fielded grounders from his father at the bottom of a hill, knowing that if the baseballs scooted past him, they’d wind up in a meadow filled with cows. Roberto Pérez’s mother, Lilliam, a softball player, brought her son to the fields every day to instill a passion for the sport in him. Years later, after Pérez signed a long-term contract in Cleveland, he purchased Lilliam a new home when Hurricane Maria destroyed her previous one. Or, there’s the bond Terry Francona shared with his dad, from the time he was a toddler in the Cleveland dugout to the final time he ever saw Tito, on a visit to his home in Beaver Falls, Pa., where he surprised his dad on his back porch around Christmas in 2017, less than two months before Tito died.

I had an internal countdown in the back of my mind for the last quarter-century. On Tuesday, it reached zero. Now, I’m off to create some memories, stop signs be damned.

(Photo of Cleveland Municipal Stadium circa 1983: John Reid III / MLB Photos via Getty Images)

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Zack Meisel is a writer for The Athletic covering the Cleveland Guardians. Zack was named the 2021 Ohio Sportswriter of the Year by the National Sports Media Association. He has been on the beat since 2011 and is the author of four books, including "Cleveland Rocked," the tale of the 1995 team. Follow Zack on Twitter @ZackMeisel