KATOWICE, WHICH IS NOT KRAKOW, Poland – It was a little after 4 in the morning when I realized I was very much at the wrong airport in Poland and I thought of Eric Zaun.

You see, I was in Katowice, which is where I landed on my arrival, and where the wonderful people organizing the Ostrava Elite dropped me off with the rest of my van of players and staff from the event, all of whom were also on an early flight.

Problem was, my 6am flight was not flying out Katowice.

This, because there was no 6 am flight out of Katowice.

My flight, the real one, the one with an airplane and seats and everything, was a little more than an hour down the road, in Krakow, which is definitely not Katowice, which is where I was standing, phone in hand, staring at my itinerary in disbelief that, yes indeed, I was at the wrong airport.

There’s a lot of emotions that’ll run through a man’s mind in a scenario such as that.

Humor is probably not your first pick.

Yet after the stomach drop and the gut-punch and the cold sweats of how I’d tell my wife that I might not be home that night, that she might have another full day with just her and our two children after a week straight of exactly that, I began to laugh.

I laughed because whenever something goes wrong, whenever there is a hiccup in the plans or adversity presents itself in some new and inventive way, I think of Zaun.

I think of how he’d respond if he were in my shoes, size 13 Nikes that were in the wrong airport in Poland.

I once described his laugh as an explosion of laughter, and there in that airport, I heard it again.

I imagined all of those bleary-eyed European travelers, looking at us, these absurd Americans and their explosive laughter at such an ungodly hour.

I imagined how delighted he’d be.

“Oh, this is GREAT!” he’d have roared.

He loved stuff like this. LOVED it, all caps.

I can say this because I’ve seen it, in a far graver situation than this one, which really, and to Zaun’s eternal dismay, no doubt, did not take long to resolve. Saw it when we were traveling around Europe, playing something called snow volleyball, which is a real thing, although I understand if you don’t believe me. Eric rented us a car to road trip on our own from Austria to Italy in between tournaments. It wasn’t until we were getting the keys that we realized he’d rented us a manual car, and that there were no automatics on the lot, and that not a single one of us had ever driven a stick, so we’d have to learn on the fly or entertain the somewhat decent probability that we might all die trying.

Goodness, the look on his face. The delight. The wonder.

The joy — the pure, unadulterated joy.

It’s the same look my son has when we go to a construction site to see the diggers and bulldozers and giant machines doing impossible feats of machinery.

So I heard his laugh, clear as I did in that rental car office in Italy, in that airport in Katowice. And I laughed right back.

And then I smiled, because I was thinking of my friend, a friend I haven’t seen in seven years now.

I would have preferred to be at the correct airport on Monday morning.

Would have preferred to arrive in Tallahassee at 6:18 pm, as scheduled.

Would have preferred to kiss my wife at the airport, and soothed my daughter as she more than likely would have cried in the car ride home, because 6:18 pm is not an ideal time to put a 1-year-old in a car for more than 30 minutes.

Would have preferred to be there for bedtime with my children, where I would have inevitably fallen asleep singing my terrible songs to my son.

Would have preferred a lot of things, to tell you the truth.

But when things go wrong, that’s when I think of my friend the most.

That’s when I hear his explosion of laughter.

That’s when I smile some of my favorite smiles, a smile that’s just for me and him, and in that moment, I’m OK with being in the wrong airport at 4 in the morning.

Because Eric Zaun is there too.