COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Twenty-four years ago, watching from the crowd at Kirby Puckett’s Hall of Fame induction, Jill Dubis told her husband, Ron, they would come back to Cooperstown. Joe Mauer, a smart, polite, hard-working math major, had just been drafted by his hometown Minnesota Twins. When he got here, she said, they would come back.

And here they were this weekend, some 1,165 miles from Cretin-Derham Hall High School in St. Paul, Minn., Jill in her wheelchair, Ron in a T-shirt that read “Optimist Since 1991” in team letters – the year of the Twins’ last championship. Joe had done his part by getting into the Hall on his first tryout after 15 remarkable seasons for the local team. Now his math teacher had done his part, too.

“He was a great student, the kind of student you wanted to fill a whole class with,” Jill Dubis said. “Everything you heard about him is true.”

Sunday was a day for local legends, as the incoming class of Hall of Famers took the stage at the foot of a rugged hillside filled with pilgrims. The honorees were three former players with deep ties to their community — Adrián Beltré, Todd Helton and Mauer — and a manager with a peculiar feel for the crowd, Jim Leyland.

“In Pittsburgh, it never felt like ‘manager and fans’ — it felt more like ‘manager and friends,'” Leyland said. “I know we made you happy and I know we broke your heart. But I always felt like we were together.”

Leyland spent 19 of his 22 seasons as manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates and Detroit Tigers, winning more than 1,500 regular-season games and dozens more in the playoffs, but his only championship came in a brief hiatus against the Florida Marlins in 1997. Beltré, Helton and Mauer never won a World Series.

It was heartening, then, that the champion-or-bust worldview that seems to dominate sports today did not cloud this sunny afternoon. Mutual gratitude was everywhere — Mauer and Minnesota, Helton and Colorado, Beltré and Texas. They are forever linked in bronze in the plaque gallery.

Mauer could have played elsewhere. In 2018, his senior season, the Twins told him they would trade him and take his salary if he wanted a shot at a championship in another city. Mauer acknowledged that it was human nature to dream of another home. But he never liked that vision, either in his final or prime years.

“The bottom line is, I never wanted to leave,” he said. “I felt like we could win in Minnesota, and that’s what I wanted to do. There’s nothing I would have liked more than to win the last game of the year and bring it home for the Twins. But I enjoyed putting on the jersey and was very grateful for the opportunity.”

Mauer was the fourth St. Paul native to enter the Hall of Fame, along with Paul Molitor, Jack Morris and Dave Winfield. The others returned to Minnesota after proving themselves elsewhere. Only Mauer was a career Twin.

“Last night at the Twins party they invited us all to take a picture on stage and that really hit me at the time,” Mauer said. “Coming from Minnesota and growing up in Minnesota, they gave me hope and told me you can make it from here.”

Helton wasn’t from Colorado; he was a kid from Knoxville, Tenn., who stayed home to play college baseball and football. On Sunday, he wore a University of Tennessee lapel pin — and purple socks for the Rockies, who drafted him in 1995.

The franchise was just two years old at the time, and the sports-loving city was still under the influence of baseball when Helton reached the majors in 1997. The Rockies led the league in attendance during Helton’s first three seasons, and he was hooked.

“When I first went there, every game was like Tennessee’s home football game,” Helton said. “I mean, they were out there partying and dancing and you could hear the music. So I felt right at home.”

Dan Sage, who came to Cooperstown from Centennial, Colo., with his son Scott, said the affection was mutual. The family had season tickets at Mile High Stadium and then at Coors Field. Late in Helton’s career, they saw him on a rehab assignment with the Grand Junction Rockies; swinging in a batting cage under the stands, Helton interacted easily with the fans — a Hall of Famer in waiting, but a regular guy.

“He’s modest, he’s down-to-earth, like a lot of people from Colorado,” Sage said. “And he’s a terrific player.”

Beltré did see some action; the Los Angeles Dodgers promoted him during the troubled offseason of 1998, after trading Mike Piazza, when Beltré was just 19. He was inconsistent for a while, then broke out in 2004 with 48 home runs and a . 334 average and signed a five-year contract with the Seattle Mariners.

After a stellar 2010 season with the Boston Red Sox, Beltré signed with the AL champion Texas Rangers. Some fans weren’t sure what to think, like Matthew Stookey, then a teenager who had flown in from Fort Worth with his family to celebrate Beltré’s big day.

“We brought him in the offseason after we didn’t get Cliff Lee, and I think in the middle of that we all thought, ‘Oh, no, maybe this is it,'” he said. “And then Beltré came in and immediately took on the whole personality of the team and led us to more success, and we were almost there. He made it a lot of fun to watch and to be a Rangers fan.”

Beltré’s Rangers famously fell one inning short of a championship (in consecutive innings) in Game 6 of the 2011 World Series in St. Louis. He spent eight years in Arlington, leading the team to two more division titles during a downturn.

“(At first) what I wanted to do was find a team that gave me a chance to go to the World Series, and they had a great team,” Beltré said. “But then, it became something more. They allowed me to be myself, to come to a team that they had already put together with a great leader like Michael Young, and be a part of that. And the fans were very, very great to me. My family and I felt comfortable in Texas, so after a year or two, I knew it was the right fit.”

Beltré became the third player to wear the Rangers logo on his license plate, after Nolan Ryan and Iván Rodríguez, but Leyland preferred a blank cap and Hall granted his request.

“I couldn’t disrespect anybody,” said Leyland, whose close friend Tony La Russa also managed many teams and walked onto the field without a logo on his cap. Recent players — Roy Halladay, Greg Maddux, Fred McGriff, Mike Mussina — have done the same.

It’s part of a relatively new trend that is well-intentioned but historically inaccurate; they never actually wore empty hats, so it might have been better not to. In any case, Leyland’s affection for the fans – all of them – was a touching moment on a Sunday full of them.

Holding back his tears, he concluded his speech as follows:

“No matter which Hall of Famer you’re here to support today or which team you support, your presence is always felt. When you step up in the ninth inning and the home team is ahead by one. When you turn on your television for the first game of the World Series and see 50,000 fans hoping and praying that this is their year. Or when a little boy or girl gets her first autograph and runs back into the stands to show her mom and dad their latest treasure.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s you. This is baseball. And this is the Hall of Fame. Thank you very much.”

(Top photo of Jim Leyland, Adrian Beltre, Todd Helton and Joe Mauer (left to right): Jim McIsaac/Getty Images)