DENVER -- It was November 2019, and Caroline Paff was in the last stages of her battle with colon cancer.

“October,” she said. “October 2014.”

Her son and his uncle looked at each other. One of them didn’t know what she was referring to, stressing that medication had probably made her incoherent. The other did.

She confirmed it with one more word.

“Delmon.”

Nearly two years later and two time zones away, Paff’s son walked into Coors Field on Monday night to watch one of his favorite players from his favorite team take part in the T-Mobile All-Star Home Run Derby. He sported a Baltimore Orioles hat and jersey with a gray “F16HT” shirt underneath. It was time to cheer on Trey Mancini.

Eddie Howard has been an O’s fan his entire life, thanks to his mother.

“My mom would quite literally not ever let me wear any other team,” said Howard, a native of northern Baltimore County. “Until I was older, she would not let me wear anything else other than Orioles stuff. I went to a game with my dad one time, and the old Yankee Stadium was giving away a Yankees piggy bank. I came home, and my mom said, ‘No. You can’t have that in my house,’ and threw it out.”

Baseball bonded Howard and his mom. Once when he was a middle schooler not doing his homework, his mom took away baseball on TV. But knowing her son’s love for their team, she still let him listen to the O’s on the radio.

With his mother in one house and his father and stepmother in another, Howard had a “third home” thanks to his mom’s season tickets: Camden Yards. As Howard grew up, he and his mom had baseball. Now 23, he’s been to 25 big league ballparks. “Probably close to 20” of those stops, he said, were with his mom.

In March 2019, Paff was diagnosed with colon cancer. Eight months later, she would be gone. In the interim, they had their game.

“Me and my mom rallied around baseball,” Howard said. “We went to [the Field of Dreams site] in Dyersville, [Iowa], we went to Arlington, we went to Houston all in that last year, which was really cool. It was really nice. It was something that we made sure to be able to do, those little trips -- something that we could remember this stuff by.”

As his mom’s cancer progressed, the game still lifted them.

“If something was going down, or while she was going through cancer treatments, all of that, we would talk about baseball,” he said. “It was something that would put a smile on both of our faces.”

Howard and his mom experienced countless Orioles moments together. In 2016, they were in San Diego for Mark Trumbo’s performance at the All-Star Home Run Derby. Two years before that, they were in the left-field stands at Camden Yards when Delmon Young cleared the bases with a double in the eighth to give the Orioles the lead over the Tigers.

Delmon.

That love and bond is what led Howard to Coors Field by himself, on a July night far from home, to the emerald and forest green cathedral at the corner of 20th and Blake in a city 1,700 miles from his own.

“Look, if he can survive cancer,” Howard said into his phone on Monday night, “he can do anything.”

On the other end of his call was Howard’s father, Brian. The younger Howard had arrived at Coors Field to cheer on Mancini, who was diagnosed with colon cancer -- the same brutal disease that took Howard’s mom -- almost exactly one year after her diagnosis. With Howard having moved to Denver just a month ago, the timing seemed serendipitous. Mancini’s selection to the event made it surreal.

“He could’ve gotten out in the first round, and I still would’ve been ecstatic to be here and support my favorite team, support one of my favorite players and on top of that, more important than anything else, somebody who survived a battle that I know is incredibly challenging,” Howard said.

Mancini was declared cancer-free last November, one year after Paff passed away.

“It means a lot to somebody who lost somebody, because there were times when I would look at my mom, and I’d know that she was not going to make it,” Howard said. “But hearing somebody on a big stage make it known to the world that, you know what? Cancer sucks, but I can beat it and return to normal life and almost win a frickin’ Home Run Derby on top of that, almost beating a guy who hit 35 home runs in the first round.”

Mancini lit up the Denver sky with homers on Monday night. After belting 24 in the first round to beat Oakland’s Matt Olson, he eliminated Colorado’s Trevor Story with 13 in the second. Mancini came up just short in the final against defending champion Pete Alonso of the Mets, who also won in 2019. The final result wasn’t important to Howard. Monday was about something more.

“Being able to see Trey in that way -- it’s a nice kind of wrapping moment that way, fill the whole circle and have the whole story,” Howard said. “I obviously wish he could’ve won, but I said to my dad, ‘If you’re a cancer survivor, you can basically beat anything.’

“I will be a Trey Mancini fan for the rest of my life.”