Memorial Day weekend is, as the name suggests, a time for remembrance and, one also supposes, celebration.

The barbecue didn’t see much use this time. Morale was a little lower around my house — yard work seemed a lot more palatable — with the news that former University of Montana defensive lineman Jesse Sims had died.

By my count, and this is since 2010, that’s four extremely stout men of the Grizzly defensive front who have lost their lives. This cannot be sustainable.

It isn’t fair. Men, or kids, are supposed to become octogenarians at least, given their athleticism and training. Sims was just 24 when he had his ATV accident, and was such a specimen it doesn’t seem possible.

Frank Gogola of 406mtsports.com related an anecdote in which former Griz coach Bob Stitt, knowing Sims’ affinity for country music, arranged to have him meet Toby Keith in Missoula. Keith’s son Stelen Covel was being recruited; Stitt had Sims stop by The Depot restaurant, where a T-shirt was signed.

Keith then asked if that was one of the Grizzlies’ seniors. Stitt had to tell him that — like Stelen — Sims was a senior in high school.

So it was. When Sims was an eighth-grader-to-be, and it being the “silly season” of summer, I covered a YMCA 3-on-3 tournament in Missoula. He was on a team called “Some Dudes,” and they dominated behind their 6-foot-3 pivot.

David Crisp was on the team, and had met Sims a couple Halloweens before, at a tourney in Spokane. “We were playing (against him) and he is just killing us,” said Crisp, a Tacoma native who would score 1,507 career points for the Washington Huskies.

So, Crisp’s coach asked Sims’ dad: Can he play for us? Sims and Crisp played all over the Western US.

At the time Sims seemed a lock, like say Brock Osweiler, to be a Division I basketball player. But he grew just one inch taller and despite being the State A tournament MVP as a sophomore, when Stevensville won its first and only championship, he became a prized football recruit.

Sims was set on Oregon State before a coaching change; he ended up at UM, where his sister Alycia had been a Lady Griz standout. Sims ended up wearing the No. 37 jersey, a treasured honor handed down to whichever Montana native has enough barbed-wire toughness to deserve it.

A few weeks after that 2010 YMCA 3-on-3 my stepson went to a tournament at St. Matthews in Kalispell and parents were demanding to see a birth certificate for Sims, who honest to mom looked 18, easy.

My wife and other parents paraded to officials, telling them that the Stevensville kid, who by now was in tears, was indeed 13. Tournament officials eventually relented, and he played.

That year, 2010, was a tough one. Less than three weeks before that 3-on-3 I covered the funeral of Tim Bush, who had died in a mining accident in Idaho at the age of 29. It was just shy of 11 years later than Sims passed.

A couple years after Bush died, Curt Colter, like Bush a starter on the Grizzlies national championship team, passed away from a heart ailment. Thirty-three. In 2015 Kole Swartz, a high school teammate of my stepson’s and a Griz defensive end, died in a gun accident. Nineteen.

Friends and family (no media) will gather for a celebration of Sims, another one-of-a-kind athlete and person. I still find it unlikely that the young man is gone. It may take a while to eventually relent.

Fritz Neighbor can be reached at 758-4463 or [email protected]