The girl in the No. 8 jersey

NOVATO, Calif. — I was on the sideline of a soccer field two Saturdays ago, watching my 12-year-old daughter and her Novato teammates. I don’t remember much about that game, but Novato won, and one of the goals was scored by the smallest girl on the team, a quick and feisty forward who wears a long ponytail and jersey No. 8. We whooped and cheered her name.

I found out later that her parents weren’t there that afternoon. They were in Las Vegas for a getaway weekend.

About 36 hours later, I was on my way to Las Vegas myself, rushing to join my New York Times colleagues to cover the latest mass shooting, maybe bigger than them all. I hadn’t covered one of them since 1999, when I was in the wrong place at the right time and rushed into the aftermath of Columbine.

A colleague of mine and I checked into a massive suite at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, 11 floors directly below that of the shooter. It had the same view of the concert ground across the Strip, where investigators in the daylight were picking through the carnage of the night before. That was about when my wife sent me a text. That little soccer player’s mom was at the concert the night before, she said. She’s missing.

But Stacee Etcheber was not my story. The gunman was. I spent a week mostly about 100 feet below where the shooter committed mass murder, trying to solve the mystery of what he’d done. I talked to people, followed every lead and wrote stories. It’s what reporters do. It was a news story, as horrific as they come, and we’re trained to keep our emotional distance from the things that we cover.

Late that night, I stood in front of the window, the same one that a madman broke 11 floors above and used as a perch to shoot hundreds of people he did not know. The body count was on its way to 58. I thought about home.

Stacee’s family soon announced that she died. My wife and I didn’t