From the time of Tom Mickle's passing last week, I've been haunted by a conversation that took place in early March.

In an interview with Gene Corrigan before the final game at Virginia's University Hall, the conversation turned to Corrigan's selection as this year's winner of the Skeeter Francis Award.

Corrigan was an obvious choice for the award, having started the ACC Service Bureau, an office that Francis later headed for 22 years. Francis mostly was involved in media relations, although the Francis Award has not been limited to media types.

"You know who needs to get that award?" Corrigan volunteered. "Tom Mickle should get that award. In fact, I'll be happy to step aside this year. I can wait till next year. You never know what will happen."

While the Mickle name might not be recognizable to many sports fans in Virginia, he was in and out of the news for two decades, first as assistant and associate commissioner of the ACC for 13 years and more recently as the CEO of Florida Citrus Sports, the organization that oversees Orlando's two bowl games, the Capital One Bowl and the Champs Sports Bowl.

Everybody knew that Mickle was facing a tough fight after learning in January that he had kidney cancer. However, there was no way for Corrigan to know that Mickle would be gone in another year, much less six weeks.

The fact is, Mickle had been tested April 14 at Duke and learned that the first stage of chemotherapy had been successful. Friends of the Mickle family were advised of those results in an e-mail sent by his wife, Jill, two nights later.

The next morning, Mickle collapsed in his office at Florida Citrus Sports in Orlando, Fla., and could not be revived.

When Jill Mickle got around to her e-mails, half were from friends expressing their shock and condolences and half were from excited well-wishers who had received her Sunday e-mail but had not heard of Mickle's passing.

On vacation with my family at Walt Disney World, I hadn't received the original e-mail and wasn't in the office to take phone calls from mutual friends. I didn't know anything until I came across an Orlando Magic broadcast, which the announcer opened with the words, "We've got some sad news about Tom Mickle ..."

I knew immediately what that sad news was. The suspicion is that Mickle, 55, died from a heart attack or a stroke, but you can't help but believe that he was left vulnerable by the cancer treatments.

"Despite the odds against it and the evidence to the contrary, Mickle was convinced Orlando someday would become a sports hotbed," Orlando columnist Mike Bianchi wrote last week. "Mickle wanted so much more in a town that too often settles for less. He dreamed big in a town filled with small thinkers."

Mickle's impact in the college sports world was so profound that a crowd of 700, including numerous conference commissioners, athletic directors and television executives, were at his funeral in Winter Park, Fla.

One can only imagine the legacy Mickle would have left if he had gotten either of the two jobs he really wanted, the ACC commissioner's job that went to North Carolina athletic director John Swofford after Corrigan retired in 1997 or the Duke AD job that went to Joe Alleva in 1998.

Although he had his supporters for the ACC job, Mickle had a Duke background that was too similar to Corrigan's. However, Mickle's history as a Duke student, football team manager, sports information director and promotions director should have been hard for the Blue Devils to pass up.

The choice of Alleva, an assistant AD and baseball coach, created a rift between Duke and one of its previously unabashed alumni, author and longtime Mickle friend John Feinstein, that hasn't closed over the past eight years.

"There are few things that would have caused me to turn against Duke and publicly rip it the way I did," Feinstein said. "Very few things."

A search through the archives reveals that Mickle was among those mentioned as a possible candidate when Virginia Tech hired Jim Weaver as athletic director in 1999 and when Virginia hired Craig Littlepage in 2001. When ex-Virginia Tech athletic director Dave Braine was hired by Georgia Tech, Mickle was among the finalists.

It wasn't a lack of smarts that caused Mickle to fall through the AD cracks. Mickle is universally credited for plotting the current Bowl Championship Series, then known as the Bowl Alliance, on a cocktail napkin.

I've never been a fan of the BCS and I'm not sure Mickle was either. If somebody had asked him to draw up a plan for a long-overdue Division I football playoff, I'm sure he could have.

Mickle was a take-charge guy without a take-charge personality. A group of sportswriters and other characters used to dine every year at the ACC Tournament -- "the- middle-of-the-room dinner," we called it -- but it fizzled after Mickle left the ACC.

Keeper of traditions. That was another Mickle role. It shouldn't be forgotten that, when Francis retired after his lengthy stint in the ACC Service Bureau, it was Mickle who took his place.

Maybe one day, he, Corrigan and Francis will have their name on a trophy together.