I never was a Graceland guy -- but I did once climb halfway up the back fence of the place to glimpse the grounds.

I never was a mourning guy -- but I did have to pull off a road in Florida 25 years ago this afternoon to try and pull myself together. The bulletin had come across the car radio, and my young daughter must have wondered why, after a joyous visit to Circus World, her father was sitting and staring and trembling and doing everything possible to keep from weeping in front of her.

It is, of course, impossible for anyone aligned with his cult, his style, his way, his generation, to explain to today's crowd who exactly Elvis Presley was, what he meant, why he mattered, when he (to quote a later troubadour) "filled you to the marrow" and how he changed merely everything.

It isn't enough that we E-ologists mark our maturation with Presley moments -- Elvis Joins The Army, Elvis Live From Hawaii, Elvis (ugh) Meets Nixon, Elvis (ThankyuhThankyuhverimuch) Gets Fat On Peanut Butter Sandwiches -- or recall precisely our own life's details at the terrible moment we discovered he was gone.

It isn't enough that right now Lilo and Stitch features five of The King's recordings or that the Nike World Cup ad campaign turned Elvis' obscure A Little Less Conversation into the No. 1 song in the UK as well as a hit all over the world or that a terrific percentage of all those people keeping vigil in Memphis this week actually believe E is comin' back soon.

It isn't even enough to acknowledge that of the 600,000 pilgrims who visit Graceland each year, half are under 35. (Meaning that when Elvis died, all those fans weren't even 10.)

Too bad. They just ... weren't ... there.

Read 'em and believe it. Not Valentino or JFK or Frank Sinatra or Muhammad Ali or The Beatles or -- forgive me, E! -- any current combinations of EminTupacDiddyDogg, impacted American youth in quite the same way this slick-haired hick from the trailor park side of Tupelo, Miss., was able to.

My first daughter, Sage, once screamed herself into a 24-hour case of hoarseness following a Michael Jackson concert. My second, Chelsea, had an autographed Leonardo DiCaprio photo framed in a place of honor over her bed. Whenever I tried to tell them these were shallow pretenders, pure pikers, in comparison to the appeal of Elvis, they simply laughed and didn't get it.

Too bad. They just ... weren't ... there.

It was the record producer, Glen Ballard, who said recently, "You know, 200 million people go by, and then God goes: 'Okay, you get it' -- and [Elvis] was the guy that got it."

As a teenager, to experience Elvis Presley over television (where, it's no joke, they once refused to show him from the waist down) or radio or on the stereo or the silver screen was to court freedom and love and sex all at once.

And sport? Well, no. Except for this: What everybody says is so special about sport is its fun, immediacy, unpredictability, spontaneity and entertainment value. As much as we've witnessed Barry Bonds go yard or Emmitt Smith go up the middle or Karl Malone and John Stockton go pick 'n roll, unrehearsed sport is never the same, never like anything else.

And thus:

Memphis Record Label Exec (circa 1953): "What kind of singer are you?"

Elvis: "I sing all kinds."

MRLE: "Well, who do you sound like?"

Elvis: "I don't sound like nobody."

Working most of the huge, glamorous sporting events -- Olympics, World Cups, Super Bowls, World Series, Final Fours -- is one thing. But watching, hearing and especially feeling Elvis in the Astrodome that time was unlike any experience I've had before or since.

As for the way this boyhood idol (boyhood? Who am I kidding? More like lifelong icon) tragically left all of us -- drugged, bloated, alone near his beloved Jungle Room, helpless on the toilet -- I prefer to ... not ... go ... there. As William F. Buckley -- yes, the distinguished political commentator, but also the author of Elvis In The Morning -- writes in the current issue of TV Guide: "Elvis' body was a battleground of drugs and a wasteland of self-indulgence. Better to think of him -- why not? -- as a man who died from eating one too many chocolate bars. That's the best way to think of what did him in."

That's if E really is, of course, done in.

Not that I'm one of those. But of all the interviews I've done over a thousand years at Sports Illustrated, Newsweek and ESPN, two stand out and continue to keep Elvis alive for me: Burt Reynolds -- reminiscing for an hour about his heady Hollywood days in the company of E -- and George and Geri DeViney.

The Devineys were the father- and mother-in-law of a precocious University of Mississippi basketball player named Johnny Neumann, who led the NCAA in scoring in 1972-73, his sophomore year. One night, while I was sitting around Neumann's off-campus apartment with his then-wife Carolyn's parents, they mentioned that one of their classmates at Humes High School in Memphis had been none other than Elvis Presley.

After I had climbed up off the floor and composed myself, the DeVineys regaled me with stories of The King -- none both so pure and poignant as their too-late, plain-folks understanding of just what they had missed in their midst. "The King wore cranberry shirts to school every day and didn't have any friends," Geri DeViney said. "He'd sit out in the hall at lunch and pick that guitar in a corner. Everybody would laugh at him and, sure enough, he used to say: 'Go 'head. Go 'head and laugh, y'all.' "

And then Geri DeViney said: "We're sorry now. Dang! The one and only."

Elvis' singularity hardly could be described in more simple terms. But, of all the memories on this 25th anniversary of his death, matching in eloquencewas a recollection by the enigmatic songwriter, Tom Waits, who was at a drive-in restaurant in Los Angeles on August 16, 1977: "I looked over at the guy next to me and he was a tow truck driver with a perfect pompadour," Waits said. "He had his window down, a newspaper on his lap and he was crying. It was a heavy day. It was like a light went out. It was like something fell out of the sky."

Probably those were teardrops, too.

A quarter-century later, they're still falling.

Dang! The one and only.

Curry Kirkpatrick is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at curry.kirkpatrick@espnmag.com.