There isn’t much in the sport of stock car racing that Denny Hamlin hasn’t done. He’s won races at every level, ascended to the top ranks with haste and has stayed there ever since.

That is barring the major asterisk on his resume, no championships. Repeatedly this year, Hamlin says that he’s content with never winning a championship in his career and that his only goal this year was reaching 60 wins. It’s the talk of a reflective Hamlin, who realizes his time in the sport is ending and that he’s no longer focused on the so-called mountain top.

Like many, I doubted this notion. Can an athlete really be okay never winning a championship? Walking away from the sport that has consumed them with a passionate fire since before they could walk, without a defining moment, seems insane.

Yet, races like today are why we watch NASCAR, in search of the answer to questions like those. Hamlin delivered an answer today: absolutely yes, he wanted win number 60 more than anything.

After Hamlin found his way around teammate Chase Briscoe with two laps to go, an emotional, golden hour glare came over the purple and orange tinted visor of the #11’s driver. As he crossed the start finish line and lifted that visor that conceals all emotion, tears burst from the dam of his eyes.

“We all know you earned that for your dad,” Chris Gayle, Hamlin’s crew chief said. “We all know, love you man.”

Hamlin’s father has been dealing with health issues and before that was a known hater of his faux-villainy act. That’s why seeing Hamlin drop the ‘I beat your favorite driver’ act and embrace the majesty of the moment, moving his way into the top 10 race winners in the history of the sport, was different.

For 20-years Hamlin has been chasing a championship that has slipped through his grasp one way or the other. Blame the playoff format, driver error or nearly anything else under the sun, it’s simply never come to fruition. It’s Hamlin’s white whale and to some extent for the last two decades it has consumed him.

Along the way, Hamlin changed, willing to do anything to chase a title. It led to feuds with half of the Cup Series field and fanbases, and I bet if you say his name around most NASCAR fans a resounding groan would be the first noise out of their mouth.

I was the same way, finding my takeaways from the Kansas race where I go in on Hamlin for his decision to door slam Bubba Wallace and let Chase Elliot win that race. Yet, listening to the Door, Bumper, Clear podcast that week Wallace’s spotter Freddie Kraft said something that caught my attention.

“There’s more to it than that… When my dad died Denny was like the first person to reach out, offered to pay for the funeral and a bunch of other things” Kraft said. “Racing is racing, life is life.”

Hamlin has played this faux-villain for years and so much so that it’s changed the way that people think about him. Today broke that barrier between racing and life in a beautiful way that racing fans shouldn’t forget for the rest of his career. 

While it won’t be the final feather in the cap for Hamlin, it will almost certainly prove the most significant. Not for its playoff implications nor for the fact it locked him into the next round with a chance to race for the ever elusive championship, this win will stand the test of time because for a second, as tears rolled down his face, we were all Denny Hamlin.