The Magazine's Jeff Bradley couldn't wait to watch Sunday's Daytona 500 with his two sons. All of a sudden, he -- and they -- were confronted by death.

It was a NASCAR Christmas at the Bradley house this year. Everywhere you looked, you'd see another little race car, courtesy of dad.

I got a kick out of teaching my two sons, Tyler (4 1/2) and Beau (2 1/2), the numbers and the names.

"What number is Jeff Gordon?" I'd ask Tyler.

"Twenty-four," he would answer, then point to the correct car.

"Who's that, Beau?" I'd ask.

"Jeremy Mayfield," he would answer.

"Number 12," Tyler would add.

Now understand, I'm not even a NASCAR fan. But because of my kids' interest, I felt compelled to get Tyler jacked up for Sunday's Daytona 500. On Saturday, I must have told him 10 times, "Tomorrow's the big race, Ty. We gonna watch it together?"

"Yeah!" Tyler yelled.

So, on Sunday, I turned the race on. Tyler got excited when he recognized "Number 4, Robby Gordon!" After a while, he went back to being a 4 1/2-year old, which means, basically, wanting to do a different activity every three-and-a-half minutes.

With two laps to go, I called Tyler in to watch the finish. He saw Dale Earnhardt's crash and said, "Whoa!," but I quickly got him focused on the guy who won, Michael Waltrip. "Do we like him?" he asked.

"Sure," I said.

And that was it, until I sat down in front of the TV a bit later and heard the horrifying news: Earnhardt had been killed. Of course, Tyler saw that I was watching race cars again and wanted to join me. I changed the channel.

"Let's watch something else," I said. I went to another room, hoping to follow the story in solitude, but as always, Tyler was right behind me. For a moment, a very brief moment, I thought about trying to explain to my son what had happened to to Earnhardt. But I knew he wasn't ready for that. I wasn't either.

I'm thinking that generic race cars may be the way to go from now on. They've got numbers, and we can make up our own names.

Jeff Bradley is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at jeff.bradley@espnmag.com.