The joy is what you remember now, as a pall falls over the sunlit desert. The joy and the giddiness and, most of all, the gleeful serendipity of a day unmatched by any.

Here was Dan Wheldon on that fortune-kissed day in May, babbling on and on as if he would never stop. Here was a man whose life was full to the top, with a wife and two kids and a victory in the greatest event in his sport that almost literally fell out of the sky. How it was payback, somehow, for a man who had lost his full-time ride and whose mother was ill, and who was only trying to help out an old teammate and dear friend, team owner Bryan Herta.

And now, in an instant, he is gone.

Now, at 33, Dan Wheldon gets up in the fence in the middle of a 15-car crash out there in the Las Vegas desert, and he departs this earth between one breath and the next. Now he confirms once again the home truth that what a man loves best is what can kill him the surest, especially if what he loves best is strapping into a guided missile and driving it in circles at 220 mph.

Wheldon's death 11 laps into the season's final IndyCar race at Las Vegas on Sunday is at once the most prominent racing fatality in a decade – no one with a comparable résumé (two Indy 500 victories) has been killed in a racing accident since Dale Earnhardt died at Daytona in 2001 – it's also a sobering reminder that no matter how much those of us who love auto racing like to champion its relative safety, it is still a blood sport. People are going to die, when the goal is to push the boundaries beyond where they reasonably should be pushed. All the SAFER barriers and HANs devices ever devised can't keep that from happening.

Sometimes those people will be young and unknown and blips on America's radar, for all the grief their passing will bring to those who loved them. And sometimes they will be Dan Wheldon.

Sometimes they will be a husband and father who, across the last decade, I probably interviewed more than a dozen times, and chatted informally with another dozen. And so, across 34 years of covering motorsports, I probably feel this loss as acutely as I've ever felt any. I can't believe I'll never be asking the man a question again. I can't believe he'll never be giving me the kind of thoughtful, considered answer every journalist yearns to get, and for which I routinely, and specifically, sought him out.

Already now, I'm thinking ahead to next May, and a grim piece of history to add to a place built on history, grim and otherwise: For the first time since 1947, the defending Indianapolis 500 champion (it was George Robson then) will not be there because he was killed later in the same racing season. Already I have the moment I knew he was gone burned into my brain – when I saw his good friend and former teammate Tony Kanaan sitting on the pit wall wiping away tears, minutes before the official announcement.

Already – and for a long time, I have a feeling – I'll remember a particular moment on race day morning, two or three years ago. I was sitting in the Honda tent, having breakfast. At some point, Wheldon strolled in. He filled his plate and walked past me toward another table, and as he passed our eyes met.

I doubt he knew who I was. But we'd talked often enough that he recognized me, even if he didn't know the context. And so he nodded.

"Hello," he said.

"Good luck today," I said.

And for just a second, a thought flitted through my brain: This might be the last time I talk to that guy.

It wasn't, thank God. But now of course it will be.