The news arrived at 3 p.m., almost to the minute. It was fully expected.

Coach Rhule walked to the stadium and took one last look at the empty stands. Later, the groundskeeper whom Rhule rarely acknowledged admitted he was surprised that Rhule spoke to him; but because Rhule spoke after the lawn had been cut, the groundskeeper thought that Rhule might have been addressing the discarded clippings, the way that Luke Kuechly did during a pre-game warmup one time.

“Good-bye,” Coach Rhule said. He walked back up the hill to the team’s training facility. Mrs. Fleming asked him if he wanted some Gatorade, but Coach Rhule told her that he felt too tired for Gatorade; he wanted to lie down.

Ben McAdoo and Steve Wilks were watching film of special teams, and Rhule poked his head into the room to speak to them. “You’re spreading yourself too thin, Ben,” Rhule told him. “Stay focused on the offense.” He then walked a short distance with Wilks, back toward the orphanage. “If I had to go back to coaching college ball,” he told him, “I’d probably want to be in the SEC, but I don’t want to go back to coaching college ball.”

Then he went into the dispensary and closed the door. Despite the fall weather, it was still warm enough to have the window open during the day; he closed the window, too. It was a new, full can of ether; perhaps he jabbed the safety pin too roughly into the can, or else he wiggled it around too impatiently. The ether dripped onto the face mask more freely than usual; his hand kept slipping off the cone before he could get enough to satisfy himself. He turned a little toward the wall; that way, the edge of the windowsill maintained contact with the mask over his mouth and nose after his fingers relaxed their grip. There was just enough pressure from the windowsill to hold the cone in place.

This time he traveled to Southern Methodist University; how lively it was there, at the beginning of the 80’s. The young coach was constantly embraced by the players. He remembered sitting with a Mustangs running back – a self-described “collector” – in a bar; all the patrons bought them cognac. The player put out his cigar in a snifter of Cognac that he couldn’t finish – not if he intended to “go hunting” that evening – and Matt Rhule breathed deeply of that aroma. That was how University Park smelled – like cognac and ash.

That, and like the perfume of soon-to-be-dismembered prostitutes. Rhule had tried to walk the running back home and avoid any incidents – he’d been a good coach, even there, even then. That was when the woman had accosted them. She was a whore, quite clearly, and she was quite young.

“No, no!” he tried to warn her; he had to wave his arms to keep her away. One hand, swinging back and forth beside the bed, knocked over the ether can with the loose pin. Slowly, the puddle developed on the linoleum floor; it spread under the bed, and all around him. The strength of the fumes overpowered him – the woman in University Park had smelled very strongly, too. Her perfume was strong, and stronger still was the coppery scent of her entrails as the running back began his butchery. “That’s five!” the player exclaimed jubilantly. By the time Rhule moved his face away from the windowsill and the cone fell, he was already gagging.

“Princes of Charlotte!” He tried to call for them, but he didn’t make a sound. “Kings of Carolina!” He thought he was summoning the police, but no one could hear him. He thought he was vomiting; he was.

The cause of death would be respiratory failure, due to aspiration of vomit, which would lead to cardiac arrest. The NFL’s salary arbitration committee – in light of the evidence submitted against him – would privately call it a suicide; the man was about to be disgraced, they told themselves. But those who knew him and understood his ether habit would say that it was the kind of accident a tired man would have. Certainly, Mrs. Fleming knew – and Baker Mayfield, and Steve Wilks, and Ben McAdoo knew, too – that he was not a man “about to be disgraced”; rather, he was a man about to be no longer of use. And a man of use, Matt Rhule had thought, was all that he was born to be.

Steve Wilks, who for some time would remain almost speechless, found his body. The dispensary door was not a perfect seal, and he thought that the odor was especially strong and that Coach Rhule had been in there longer than usual.

Coach McAdoo, who hoped he’d gone to a better world, read, in the voice of a troubled thrush, a quavering passage from John Madden’s autobiography “Hey, Wait a Minute! (I Wrote a Book!)” aloud in the next quarterbacks meeting.

The players love and need routine, the coaches reminded each other.

Kevin Gilbride, who was tough as nails and found Bissinger a sentimental bore, had a firm grasp of the language; he read aloud an almost hearty passage of “Friday Night Lights” to the receivers. But he found himself broken by the prospect of the expected benediction.

It was Matt Lombardi who said it all, according to the rules.

“Let us be happy for Coach Rhule,” she said to the attentive players. “Coach Rhule has found a family. Good night, Coach Rhule,” Coach Lombardi said.

“Good night, Coach Rhule!” the players called.

“Good night, Matt!” Steve Wilks managed to say, while Kevin Gilbride summoned his strength for the usual refrain, and Ben McAdoo, who hoped the evening wind would dry his tears, marched down the hill to the railroad station – once again to inform the frightened stationmaster that once again there would be a new head coach in Charlotte.