On Sunday in Charlotte, Panthers quarterback Cam Newton gave the football with which he had just scored the game's first touchdown to a grinning child in a front-row end zone seat at Bank of America Stadium.
Newton didn't know the boy he presented with the ball - which was sort of like getting one of Willy Wonka's golden tickets - but said he picked the boy out because of his huge smile. So who was that mysterious kid?
His name is Law Waddill. He is 10 years old, lives in Raleigh and likes to play tackle football in his backyard so much that he broke his arm doing so. He just got his cast off and is already playing again. His very public moment with Newton overwhelmed him with joy.
"I was shaking and sweating," Law said. "There were tears in my eyes. It was really weird. Here was this Heisman Trophy winner, giving me a ball that he scored with."
Law and his 10-year-old cousin Nathan Guptill - who lives in Charlotte and was right behind Law when Newton handed up the ball - have decided to share custody of the football. It's at Nathan's house now.
"It's as much his as it is mine," said Law, a fourth-grader who went to the game after his uncle bought tickets from a friend and invited Law and his father to go. "We figure we'll switch it back and forth about every four weeks."
"I play tackle football in my backyard, too," Nathan said, "and we played after the game Sunday. But we used another ball. The Cam ball is too special."
This all started with Mike Shula. The Panthers' quarterbacks coach witnessed Newton's "Clark Kent Becomes Superman" touchdown routine a number of times already this season - he does it after every rushing touchdown and now has seven in seven games. Shula had some advice for his star rookie quarterback last week.
Newton recounted after Carolina beat Washington 33-20 Sunday: "He (Shula) says when you celebrate, it's not a celebration unless you give back. He says, 'You do all that riff raff, whatever you do, but at the end you give that football to a little kid. You find a little kid.'
"So after I did whatever I did," Newton continued, "I heard somebody (Shula) in my (helmet) headset saying, 'Give it to a little kid! Give it to a little kid!' I looked and there was this kid just gleaming from ear to ear, so I gave it to him."
Shula declined to be interviewed about his suggestion to Newton Monday.
Law Waddill had on a Tar Heels visor, and was at his first-ever Panthers game. He was on a father-son weekend with his dad, Edmund Waddill. The two already drove from Raleigh to Clemson for a football game Saturday, watching Waddill's alma mater, North Carolina, lose handily at Clemson.
"So Sunday turned out a whole lot better than Saturday for us," Waddill said.
James Guptill said when he saw Newton approaching the two boys after the touchdown, with the crowd screaming wildly, he wondered what was next.
"I thought Cam was maybe going to jump into us," Guptill said, laughing, "and then I thought, 'Oh no, the boys are going to get smashed.' "
Panthers coach Ron Rivera said he wasn't aware Newton was going to give the football away after his TD but that he hoped the gesture became a symbol of the team's relationship with its fans.
"We're trying to develop who we are as a football team," Rivera said. "At the same time, we're trying to get our fans to understand and realize that this is a football team that wants to give back. ... I think that was awesome.
"I saw the clip (Sunday) night on the news and the excitement on that young kid's face was tremendous. It speaks volumes about Cam and who he is, but hopefully it will speak volumes about who we are as a football team."
Both 10-year-olds said they felt like celebrities for the rest of the afternoon. Fans near them several times asked them to hold up the ball and then applauded. It helped, of course, that Carolina won and everyone in the stadium was in a good mood.
I'd like to see Newton's gesture become a tradition. The Panthers' stadium has too high of a retaining wall to make a Carolina version of the Lambeau Leap possible. But handing out touchdown balls to kids is attainable, cements the player-fan connection and, best of all, makes one child (or, in this case, two) extremely happy.
As Law said a few minutes later to his father after Newton had gone back to the sideline and the boy had stopped shaking:
"Dad? Did that really just happen?"
