Every sport has a category of athlete interview I think of as the museum piece. Everything's behind glass. You get the approved anecdotes, in the approved order, and everybody goes home having seen nothing. So when a Q&A shows up where a guy actually says things, I notice.

John Candelaria sat down with Trib Live this week, and the occasion alone is worth pausing on. It's been 50 years, half a century, since Candelaria no-hit the Los Angeles Dodgers as a young lefty for the Pirates. He marked the anniversary by throwing out a ceremonial first pitch, and somewhere between that moment and this conversation, somebody took the gates off the museum case entirely.

Candelaria was inducted into the Pirates Hall of Fame this year, and it matters to him in a way he doesn't bother disguising. He grew up a Pittsburgh kid. He talks about the franchise the way people talk about a relative, affection and grievances held in the same hand. The candor is the whole draw here. He's not working from a script. He gets asked about his career, the no-hitter, and he answers like a man who stopped needing to protect his brand decades ago.

The no-hitter itself, August 9, 1976, against a Dodgers lineup that won 92 games that year, remains one of those nights old Pittsburgh fans can tell you where they were for. Candelaria was 23, in his second big-league season after debuting the year before, and he walked out and retired a contending team for nine innings without giving up a hit. Fifty years later he can still walk you through it, and the details haven't softened into fable the way these stories usually do. He remembers the hard outs. He remembers who was on the field.

What I keep thinking about is the arc nobody plans. In my recollection of 1970s baseball, he's the tall lefty they called the Candy Man, the kind of young arm people build decade-long dreams around, and then the shoulder, and the years of pitching through something that wouldn't heal right because that's what you did then. Medical care in the 1970s was basically aspirin and hope. The interview is candid about the career, the good and the costly alike.

And the ceremonial first pitch got me. A man throws a ball in a stadium where he did the real thing 50 years earlier, to the day, and the crowd reacts to the distance traveled more than the pitch itself. You can't look that up at 3 AM on any forum. It's just a guy standing in the same place, older, still recognized.

The whole conversation runs longer than most postgame quotes you'll read this week, and it's better for it. If you grew up on 1970s baseball, or you just like hearing from people who were actually there while they're still around to tell it, read the full piece. The questions were good. The answers were better.

Fifty years is a long time to carry one perfect night. He doesn't seem to mind the weight.