Trevor Story returned to Denver, but it was Rockies fan, transplant survivor who rocked Coors Field

Thomas Williams’ story got more screen time at Coors Field than Trevor Story. How crazy is that?

“I did?” Thomas asked with a grin after throwing out the first pitch for Rockies-Red Sox on Monday at Coors Field, the night Story, the former Colorado All-Star, returned to 20th and Blake. “That’s awesome. That’s so funny. I didn’t expect it at all. I miss him. I hope he gets better.”

For Williams, each day is better than the last, a chain of blessings that runs across three time zones, 25 years and two hearts.

The one bouncing between his throat and his chest Monday at Coors was a gift, implanted when he was six months old.

The Williamses know the donors were from Oklahoma. They know there was a car accident. But the giving family was anonymous. They’ve stayed that way, decades after the fact, even though Thomas is now 25, with a wicked fastball and a wicked smile. Even though Jim and Gigi, his parents, wrote them letter after letter of thanks, love to angels unknown.

“We really grieved for that family, and we still do. And it’s a very hard thing to do,” Gigi Williams told me. “It’s a bittersweet call to get — as happy as you are for your child, there’s a family out there that’s grieving.

“And to me, it’s just amazing that a family in the midst of that grief could sit, just take a step back, and say, ‘You know what? I’m going to help somebody else.’ It just blows my mind — they’re dealing with an unbelievable tragedy. But we’re thankful. We hope that they know something good comes out of such a hard situation for them.”

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The kid on the scoreboard, smiling from the jumbotron, wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for strangers, for a family’s selflessness, for a Hail Mary thrown high and far while The Good Lord ran a skinny post.

Gigi recalled the winter of 1998, the heads-up from a nurse about five days after Thomas was born.

“I had a fever, so they were afraid I had an infection due to the C-section, so they left us in a couple more days,” Thomas’ mother recalled. “Which was a huge blessing. Because it was two days later that the nurse came in to discharge him and said something wasn’t right.”

Jim and Gigi’s newborn was struggling to get blood to his extremities. Scans showed why, a checklist of awful that included narrowing of the aorta, a hole between two upper chambers and multiple holes between his ventricles and his lower chambers.

“He had a double outlet right ventricle,” Gigi explained, “so his aorta and his pulmonary artery — both came out of the right side versus one out of each side. The ultimate driver to transplant was, his left ventricle never fully developed … he had a hypoplastic left ventricle.”