The age of 27 is an age of possibilities. You’ve lived more than a quarter-century, enough time to make mistakes and learn from them. You’re old enough to have sown some wisdom, but young enough to hope for many more meaningful decades.
Josh Allen is 27. The Buffalo Bills quarterback is now a seasoned NFL veteran, but an athlete who, if he remains healthy, could have another decade of football.
At age 27, Jim Kelly, Allen’s predecessor in the lineage of Buffalo franchise quarterbacks, was still three years away from leading the Bills to four consecutive Super Bowls.
It’s the age Hunter Kelly – the only son of Jim and Jill Kelly, the little boy who was born shortly after his father retired from the NFL – would have turned last month. Hunter was born on his father’s birthday, Feb. 14, in 1997. If Hunter had been able to fulfill his dad’s dreams of throwing a football, and if he had loved the sport and been good enough too, he might just have been Josh Allen’s contemporary.
But Hunter Kelly never had a chance to make it to 27. Though he seemed healthy at birth, four months later, doctors diagnosed him with Krabbe disease, a rare, inherited disorder that affects the white matter of the brain. Krabbe diminishes the brain’s ability to send signals to the body, and Jim and Jill Kelly knew early on that for their son, it would be fatal.
“We wanted to find a cure,” Jill Kelly recalled, with Jim sitting at her side. “We wanted to find a treatment for the kids. Not to help Hunter. We didn’t ever set out to do anything to help Hunter.”
“We knew it…
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