Every now and then a story crosses my desk that has nothing to do with box scores, and this one got me anyway. The MRT has a piece on Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman reuniting for "Practical Magic 2," and the interesting part isn't the sequel. It's how differently the two stars see the original now compared with when they made it back in 1998.

Twenty-eight years. Think about that. When the first movie came out, Bullock was coming off "Speed" and "While You Were Sleeping," and Kidman was still a few years from "Moulin Rouge!" changing her whole career arc. They were young stars making a movie the critics mostly shrugged at and audiences quietly fell for. The film found its people on home video and cable, the way a lot of cult favorites do, and it never let go.

That's the part I recognize from my world. The team that gets written off in September sometimes ends up mattering more than the one everybody crowned in the preseason. Value isn't always obvious on the day it shows up.

According to the piece, both women now see the original through everything that's happened since. Loss, grief, the long stretches of a career where you wonder what any of it adds up to. What read as a whimsical witch story in 1998 apparently carries real weight for them today, and going back to it feels less like a cash grab and more like closing a circle.

Sequels this far out are risky, let me tell you. Hollywood has a long graveyard of late follow-ups that existed for no reason except the original's streaming numbers. But when the stars themselves come back carrying genuine history with the material, your odds improve. The best late sequels work because somebody involved actually missed the thing.

Bullock and Kidman stayed friends through nearly three decades, which in that business might be rarer than a franchise hitting twice. If that friendship shows up on screen, the movie's already ahead of most of them.

I write about sports because the games give us a scoreboard, but the reason any of us stick around is the long arcs. Careers, comebacks, the things people carry with them. Two actresses walking back into a house they left 28 years ago, older and bruised and wiser, is a story I'd cover any day of the week.