He took me to Cooperstown, where the National Baseball Hall of Fame is located.

Dennis Crawley Jr. died Tuesday, exactly one week before his 55th birthday and just three days after dozens of friends and relatives gathered around him in Delaware Park for the Walk to Defeat ALS, an event organized by the ALS Association that raised an estimated $161,000 for families affected by the disease.

I met Crawley about three years ago, after learning that he was the 27th person in his family to have a genetic form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive form of muscle paralysis commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

Dennis, a successful baseball coach at Depew High School, agreed to take part in an incredibly intimate photography project for The Buffalo News with talented photographer Harry Scull Jr. Dennis felt that the more people who understood the cruel and deadly nature of the disease, the better the chances for a cure.

I came as a man of words, and from the very beginning I saw the essence of the work in the sense of unity that Dennis and his family always felt with Gehrig.

Dennis has loved baseball since childhood, thanks in no small part to his sister Anita’s love of the game. Anita and her other sister, Deneane, helped raise Dennis after he lost their mother to ALS, and it was thanks to Anita that Dennis became a Yankees fan.

He soon learned the story of Gehrig, the seemingly indestructible “Iron Horse” who held the record for consecutive games played for 56 years, a record that was broken by Cal Ripken Jr. in 1995.

The series ended when Gehrig began to experience an insidious and mysterious weakness that became known as ALS, the disease that claimed his life in 1941 and became synonymous with his name.

Decades later, Gehrig’s grace, skill and, most importantly, his resilience in the face of a devastating disease would make him a lifelong hero to Dennis, a South Buffalo boy born 28 years after Gehrig’s death. He lived his life knowing that ALS could strike at any time, as it had for his sister Deneane.

Dennis had a panoramic decal honoring Gehrig on his truck, a gift from his wife, Jen, and their children. Their son, Justin, has a tattoo that intertwines his respect for Gehrig and his aunt, who lost to ALS. Justin’s sister, Ashley, wore Gehrig’s No. 4 on the softball field and switched to 44, thinking the karma would be twice as strong when she joined a team that demanded that number.

What takes the connection to another level is what Dennis has done as a coach, especially over the last few years. Every month since his diagnosis, he has received a spinal injection of Tofersen, an experimental drug from Dr. Bennett Myers of the Dent Neurological Institute.

Dennis believed it had bought him time — he had spent nearly three times as long with the disease as any relative he had lost to ALS. In 2022, the season after he learned he had ALS, Dennis and assistant coach Tony Sekuterski led Depew to its first sectional baseball title in half a century.

A year later, as the ravages of the disease made routine on-field tasks increasingly difficult, Depew players honored their coach in a way that would instantly become Western New York sports legend: They came from three outs down in the sixth inning to beat Lansing 5-4 in Binghamton to win the state Class B championship.

Their courage, their bravery, was emblematic of their coach. Dennis emphasized that success came from the players, not him — but those same players saw firsthand every day what it meant to never give up.

The family is donating Dennis’ wheelchair and medical equipment to another local patient diagnosed with ALS. They are asking friends who would like to make a memorial donation to send them to the ALS Association.

A memorial service for Dennis will be held Saturday from 2 to 7 p.m. at the Lombardo Funeral Home, 3060 Abbott Road in Orchard Park. The event is open to anyone who would like to say goodbye.

My friend Dave Lyman has started a GoFundMe campaign, which you can reach with a simple Google search, to help the Crawleys with the financial hardships of their long battle with the disease.

For my part, I immediately thought of a story I had shared with Dennis. Years ago, I had many conversations with the late George Pollack, a New York City attorney who had represented Lou’s widow, Eleanor Gehrig, for decades. The Gehrigs never had children, and Pollack was in many ways the guardian of their legacy, which he saw as a generational effort to finally defeat ALS.

Through Pollack, I learned many details of an extraordinary story from baseball’s Hall of Fame archives. Gehrig was buried in Kensico Cemetery in Westchester County after his death in 1941.

At one point, Eleanor, wary of the flood of pilgrims leaving memorials at the grave, considered moving her husband’s ashes into the hall, perhaps even placing them behind Gehrig’s plaque.

The plan was eventually abandoned, for a variety of reasons. Still, the fact that the relatives never considered the idea speaks to the kind of sacred power they gave to Gehrig’s plaque in the hall.

On Wednesday, with all this in mind, I embarked on a journey I had always hoped to make with Dennis. I arrived in Cooperstown on a beautiful summer day and walked in to shake the hand of Craig Muder, the hall’s communications director.

He took me to a display near Gehrig’s locker, which featured a picture of Gehrig and Babe Ruth embracing at Yankee Stadium on “Lou Gehrig Day” 75 years ago this summer. Then we walked to the Plaque Gallery, the heart of baseball’s temple, where plaques honor each member.

Among them is a much-visited plaque for Gehrig, depicting him in bronze with a wistful smile, his eyebrows slightly raised. It’s a look remarkably similar to the one Dennis wore in a photo of Scull on the field last year, crutches tucked under his arms and the state championship medal around his neck, just after Depew won it all.

At Muder’s request, Hall of Fame staff made a large print of that photo for the Crawley family in Buffalo. Before I left the hall with that photo, Muder put it next to Gehrig’s plaque so I could get a photo of Gehrig and Dennis side by side.

It formalized a connection Dennis had understood since childhood, but took it to a different place:

Beyond the pain, her longtime hero becomes her partner as she searches for a cure.