This is not just another column about Jackie Stiles’ talent, the Final Four or anything that you folks who don’t care much for sports are growing weary of.

This is simply from the heart of someone whose passion is troubled kids. I am a Lady Bears junkie, sure, so all week I’ve been listening to and reading local sports reporters on the Final Four. But as I learned even more about all the other schools that tried so hard to recruit Stiles, a different feeling began to well up:

Stiles hasn’t just given us four years of up-close viewing of a superb athlete becoming the greatest women’s college basketball in history. She hasn’t just put Springfield and Southwest Missouri State University on the national map with huge-school snobs who think we still use outhouses here.

She has given us a role model for young people that we may not see again in years, if ever. She’s shown them that having so much passion for something you love can make miracles, if you will just devote yourself to it and give it all you’ve got.

She’s shown them that you don’t have to have the cutest hairdo or best clothes or live in the nicest house or drive the best car to have people like you — and that’s what so many sad young people are seeking, something a lot of them classify as “popularity.” She’s taught them that what makes others like and respect you is trying to bring out the best in them as well as yourself, by being tough-minded but kind, unselfish when it counts, and humble and giving credit to others when you succeed.

She’s given them an example of the value of learning to focus, forgetting what’s going on all around you if necessary. But at the same time, she’s given them an example of someone who still finds time for fun. She likes to play board games and has close friends she hangs around with. She’s engaged to be married.

She’s taught them that bad things happen to everybody, and they work through the pain and keep on keepin’ on. For a girl to lose a lesser, weaker but beloved sibling can devastate a child and leave him or her with lasting scars and survivor’s guilt. Even Jackie Stiles was not immune to the loss of someone she treasured.

She and her entire family have given us a look at what happens when family members support each other and become involved in each other’s lives to the extent that they form a strong, interwoven fabric that can’t be broken. To adults who realize that message will be lost on families too sick, self-absorbed or otherwise flawed to be able to give that support to their children, it reinforces the message that other, stronger adults have to step in.

It tells us that if just one adult, one mentor, could support, love, invest time in and nourish one talent in one lost child, we might be looking at another Jackie Stiles someday. It allows us to teach these kids the futility of excuses, blame and cursing the past, and the value of just getting after it and getting the job done.

Lucky us. She was right here in southwest Missouri. We have no better example to lead that child with than the saga of Jackie Stiles.

When Stiles won the 2001 Wade Trophy on ESPN — and that’s ESPN Big Dog, not ESPN 2 where the so-called “also rans” run — my first thought was, well, nyah nyah. Take that, U-Conn, Tennessee, Notre Dame and fill-in-the-blank of women’s power basketball. Look who’s just been named the top women’s basketball player in the country.

But that was fleeting. As tears welled in my eyes, I just thought, “Thank you, Jackie. Thank you for being you, and thank you for choosing us.