I think I was in sixth grade when I decided that I had outgrown Eddie. That’s when I started turning in my homework as Ed. It seemed more mature, even if I really wasn’t.

But the family and friends I’d grown up with never received the memo. Why not? It was 1979 and we had no way to announce name changes, what we had for lunch or a change in our preferred pronouns. I’d like to think we wouldn’t have engaged in such lamentable navel-gazing even if we could have, but I can’t be certain of that.

So to some people, I’ll always be Eddie and that’s OK.

That group is one fewer than it was a couple of weeks ago. On Monday, I said goodbye to Mike Miller, a friend of 50 years.

The Millers — Emanuel, Okey and children Diana, Mike, Wayne and David — moved in across the street in Rock Creek in the summer of 1976. I met them the very day the family took possession of their new home. Mike and I were the closest in age and Wayne was just a couple years younger than his older brother. The three of us bonded that day when we picked up a cement septic tank lid in their front yard and somehow got Wayne’s fingers pinched under it when we put it down.

I’m sure that opening act didn’t endear me to Mr. and Mrs. Miller, but it was the beginning of 50 years of friendship.

For years, I was always at their house or they were at mine. We were always playing baseball, football or basketball — sometimes all three in a single day. We constructed baseball diamonds in their backyard and across the street in my grandmother’s yard. We marked off yardlines and end zones for football fields and even built goalposts. We constructed makeshift golf courses, soccer fields and ran track and field events.

It didn’t matter that there might only have been three of us on a given day. We figured out how to make all those games and activities work. David, who was just a baby when they moved in, became a fourth when he was old enough to play with us and probably ended up a better athlete than any of us.

The late 1970s and early 1980s were a great time to be kids in a small town in northeastern Ohio. When we weren’t playing sports, we went fishing, riding our bikes everywhere and back and exploring the woods behind both our houses. I can’t imagine any kids having it better than we did.

It was so long ago, but the memories still seem so vivid.

That first day when Mike and I dropped that piece of cement on Wayne’s fingers.

The Blizzard of 1978 with all that snow and two extra weeks off school to play in the snow.

That late August evening when Diana yelled over to us as we played baseball in my grandmother’s side yard to tell us that Elvis Presley was dead.

Rooting for the Los Angeles Dodgers against the hated New York Yankees in the World Series in 1977, ’78 and ’81.

Me running into the corner of their picnic table playing backyard football and getting 11 stitches. I still have the scar just above my left eye.

Swimming in the Buehner family’s or Powell family’s pools with the other kids in the neighborhood.

Catching frogs and snakes like it was our job.

Camping outside in a “clubhouse” my dad built or in a tent in the Millers’ backyard.

The summer of 1979 when Mike and I were teammates on the Rock Creek Dodgers.

Exploring the old, dilapidated — and admittedly dangerous — railroad trestle less than a mile away. We did it during the day and later, as we became more adventurous, at night.

Discussing our suddenly burgeoning interest in girls when all we’d previously wanted to talk about was baseball, baseball players, baseball stats and baseball cards.

It seemed like we’d be kids forever. We couldn’t imagine it ending, even as one year slipped into the next and we grew older.

At some point — as the Facebook memes suggest — we got together to play and hang out for the last time and never realized it.

But we always remained friends. I got to watch Mike become a starter on the varsity basketball team. I can still see him draining 20-footers from either baseline — that was his shot — before there was a 3-point line. He was also the most intense player the Falcons had at the time — always diving for loose balls and leaving skin on the court.

We grew up and graduated high school. I went to a Kent State branch and got a part-time job at a newspaper. Mike joined the U.S. Marines. Eventually, we both got married, started families and moved around a bit.

Mike and Kelly settled in Elyria and raised a big family. Eventually, they moved to Middlefield and we reconnected. We’d have lunch occasionally and play golf. We’d talk about our kids, politics and the old days. We were on the same page — as we always had been — even now.

I was Eddie again when I was with Mike, and I liked it. Yes, sometimes you can go home again, I thought. After a brutal winter, I was anxious to get back on the course with Mike, Kelly and David in a few weeks.

But then David called one morning a couple of weeks ago. Mike was gone — a sudden heart attack at 58. It didn’t seem possible.

We always think there will be more time, another round of golf and another lunch or dinner together. But just as we all have that last baseball game as kids together without knowing it is the last one, eventually the pattern repeats itself decades later.

In this case, it was Mike and I hugging in the same funeral parking last fall after his mom passed.

“Thanks for coming. I’ll see you, Eddie,” he told me as we embraced for what became the last time.

I’ll see you again one day, Mike.

Ed Puskas is editor of the Tribune Chronicle and The Vindicator. He can be reached at epuskas@tribtoday.com or 330-841-1786.