Remembering an athlete with a big shot and an even bigger heart.

The Sun Chronicle's lead sports page on March 16, 1987.

The years are not kind to the human body, but they are even less kind to the paper upon which your daily newspaper is printed. It yellows quickly and crumbles not long after, unless it is somehow encased in a substance that takes air and moisture out of the equation.

As a former sports journalist, I once wanted to preserve everything I wrote -- as if there was a larger purpose to be served by these words in posterity. But as the years of my career passed and the words increased in numbers from the thousands to the millions and probably billions (if not more), there was no longer enough storage space to save all this flammable newsprint. Indeed, years ago, the wakeup call came when news out of Taunton revealed that a long-time writer for the Taunton Daily Gazette had perished in a fire at his home because he could not find a path out of danger through all the stacks of old newspapers that littered every room.

I probably sent thousands of pounds of newsprint to the recycling bins over the years, including in the days immediately following the decision by new ownership to terminate my employment in August 2018. Bin after bin were filled with the remnants of my career, each of the preserved papers featuring something that I believed to be remarkable and worth preservation before the management made it clear that I was not to linger on the premises. It suddenly became quite easy to throw out so many memories.

But I saved some. And early this morning, when I read the first obituary appearing on The Sun Chronicle's website, I knew I had to leave no stone unturned to find one particular newspaper.

The obituary was of someone I still consider a "young" woman -- certainly a lot younger than I am. Her name upon her passing on Saturday of last week was Heidi Deppisch Robinson. She had turned 53 a little more than a month ago. I knew her best as Heidi Deppisch, a member of an illustrious basketball family in North Attleboro and one of the best players on the North Attleboro High School girls' basketball team that won the MIAA Division 2 state championship on Saturday, March 14, 1987, with a 70-61 victory over Athol High at what was then known as the Worcester Centrum.

Heidi Deppisch, 53

Heidi, a 6-footer that had what they call "inside-outside" skills, was equally as adept at playing in the paint as she was at shooting from 20 feet out or beyond in the days before the three-point circle. On this particular day, she was North Attleboro's leading scorer with 21 points, connecting on nine of 13 shot attempts and three of four free throws. Teammates Stephanie Cooper (20 points) and Alyssa Gutauskas (18) also brought their "A" games, as North mounted a 41-17 lead by halftime and never looked back.

But there was something very special about Heidi's performance that day -- so special that, among the other stories that were written by myself and former colleague Bob Croce on that afternoon for publication in the following Monday's paper (we did not have a Sunday paper at the time), I devoted the space usually reserved for an opinion column to inform our readers of what made Heidi's performance unique.

Here is what that column said under the headline, "Heidi Deppisch's doubts disappeared at game time."

A couple of days before the state Division 2 girls' basketball championship game, Heidi Deppisch asked a reporter an innocent-enough question.

"What's the Centrum like," she said. The reporter offered a brief description of what playing in a large, metropolitan arena was like in contrast to playing in a cozier high school gymnasium, but the explanation didn't fully answer Heidi's question.

"No," she said, "I mean, don't they have chairs and stuff behind the baskets?"

The reporter said yes, there are chairs and stuff.

"So if I shoot an air ball," she said, "it won't go halfway down the other end of the place, will it?"

The question was so typically Heidi Deppisch -- almost apologetic, yet thoroughly honest.

For a large part of the three years she, Stephanie Cooper and Alyssa Gutauskas have directed the fortunes of the North Attleboro High School girls' basketball team, Heidi has been the most anonymous of the three, the one most often overlooked by casual observers. Maybe it's her shy demeanor, or the fact that her strengths -- passing, rebounding, shot-blocking, the occasional outside shot -- aren't always noticed by those who watch only the bouncing ball or the basket.

But Saturday afternoon at Worcester's Centrum, it was impossible not to notice the Rocketeers' 5-foot-11 1/2 forward. Heidi Deppisch was ablaze with glory, calling an end to her high school career with the greatest game she has ever played.

And she picked the right time -- the game for the state championship.

Deppisch scored a career-high 21 points -- on 9-for-13 shooting from the floor and 3-for-4 from the foul line -- to lead her Rocketeers to a 70-61 win over Athol for the Division 2 state title. She was a powerful force from the second she stepped onto the court to the second she stepped off it, and never anything less.

This was also the same girl who, before the game, couldn't buy a warm-up basket.

"I looked over there and Heidi wasn't hitting anything," said Rick Smith, her coach. "So I looked away. (Assistant coach) Debbie Dalton had to come over an nudge me later to tell me she hit a couple."

Any similarities to the shy girl who feared throwing up perpetually-rolling air balls , the nervous one who couldn't find the range in warm-ups, and the dynamo who buried jumper after jumper from the outer reaches of the Centrum were not entirely coincidental. They were one and the same girl -- just different sides of her.

"I was worried," Heidi said upon emerging from the locker room after the game, her eyes reddened from the tears of joy she and her teammates shared. "The court really was different. It was a lot like playing in Franklin, only worse. I wasn't too sure in warm-ups that I could shoot here."

Somewhere between warm-ups and game time, something clicked in Heidi.

"It was the last game," she said. "That's what it was. It was knowing that we'd never play another game together, that there won't be any practice tomorrow, and that was the last game for Mr. Smith, too."

Once the game started, Deppisch hit the first shot she threw at the basket, a 15-footer from the left baseline. She also hit the second, a converted offensive rebound, and the third, another baseline pop.

By that time, she had told all of Athol, all of Worcester and anyone else who cared to listen that this was her game.

"I just got lucky," she said modestly, the sort of answer one would expect. Her coach and teammates thought otherwise.

"Heidi wasn't going to be denied," said Smith, who ended his career as the girls' coach Saturday. "She's sort of an unknown quantity in that people look at our frontcourt, see 5-10, 5-11 and 5-11 and think it's tough, but here's a 5-11 kid who can hurt you from outside, too."

"Heidi played the greatest game of her life today," added Gutauskas, the senior captain and center, who finished with 18 points to bring her own career total to 1,111. "What a way to end it. She was really terrific."

Deppisch scored 11 points in the first half as the Rocketeers rolled for a 41-17 lead over the reeling Western Mass. champions. But in the second half, Athol came back to life.

With tenacious guard Christine Chi creating havoc on defense and forward Lynn Dorrow hitting just about everything she threw at the basket, the Red Raiders cut that 24-point lead to a more manageable 16 entering the fourth quarter.

Suddenly, Deppisch became the "stopper" -- the clutch shooter who put the brakes on surge after surge by the Raiders. She hit a turnaround jumper just outside the lane on a quick pass from Cooper to open the fourth quarter. Then after a run of six more Athol points, she followed a foul shot by Gutauskas with a nothing-but-net jumper from a spot on the court which wasn't too far from the NBA three-point circle.

Athol reduced the margin to 11 points with two more left-handed hook shots by Dorrow. And again, following a free throw by Gutauskas, Cooper spied Deppisch cutting from right to left on the baseline. The pass was there, Heidi released the fall-away, and swish! -- a 13-point lead with 4:06 left.

"That's the best that play has worked all year," Cooper said. "I had no worries when I got the ball to Heidi."

Athol coach Mike King appreciated Deppisch's efforts, too.

"We tried to pack it in the middle more in the second half, and we did play better, " he said. "But it doesn't matter when 13 (Deppisch) can bury three 15-footers from the corner in a row."

The road to Saturday wasn't always a smooth one for Heidi Deppisch. Had she not been fitted for contact lenses this year and overcome the aggravations of adjusting to them, she and her teammates might not be state champions today. 

And she readily admits to uncertainty about her future, particularly in regard to basketball. She may, indeed, never play another game -- which would break the hearts of the collegiate coaches and scouts who saw her light up the Centrum Saturday.

But that was the last thing in her mind when the cheers faded away into the silence of the post-game locker room.

"We came back to the locker room, all of us with tears in our eyes, and people were asking us if we lost," she said, barely holding back more tears. "It was all we could think about, that it was over after all these years. All of a sudden, we started bawling our eyes out." 

Tears of joy, though -- the joy of knowing the rare feeling of being the absolute best at something, and wishing it could continue forever.

It can't, of course. But someday soon, when she no longer feels sadness over leaving behind these joyous times, Heidi Deppisch will be able to remember that on Saturday, she was the best of the best -- and there's no better way to end a high school career.

I'm glad I was able to find this remnant of a more innocent past, because it served to refresh my age-challenged memory and correct a few misrepresentations of fact that developed over the 35 years since that game was played. Indeed, many of Heidi's teammates didn't see her as shy at all. She was somewhat of a jokester and someone that knew how to diffuse tense situations with a quick quip. I needed to be reminded that what I perceived as shyness was just a natural reaction to being interviewed by someone 15 years her senior.

I'm glad that later in our lives, Heidi and I were able to maintain a measure of contact through social media. I'm also glad I never failed to tell her how much I still enjoyed my memories of her basketball career and my appreciation of her skills. And yes, I did poke a little fun at her abiding love for the Dallas Cowboys from time to time. But not too often.

I don't know the particulars of Heidi's passing and will not speculate. All I know is that I feel the same emptiness in my heart today as I did on Sept. 7, 1997, when I learned that Alyssa Gutauskas had passed at just 28 years of age. It hurts even more to know that Heidi's two children will no longer have their loving mother at their sides.

Heidi, Alyssa and all of those '87 Rocketeers are still happy-go-lucky kids in my mind, blazing trails on the basketball court for others to follow and crying those tears of joy in each other's arms outside their Worcester Centrum locker room.