If you don't complain a lot, the great Dan Jenkins once wrote, people get the idea all you're doing is having fun. Now you know the secret of sportswriting. We bellyache about editors, anonymity and misplaced apostrophes. We critique free food. Mostly to throw everyone else off the scent.

We are overprivileged and underpaid, as Jimmy Cannon said. And batting leadoff for all the reasons we love it: the endless characters we meet. Sometimes we cover them. Sometimes we work with them. Sometimes we meet them by happenstance.

Paul Marslano, ever the entertainer, died last week. “Mars,” as we knew him, was a sportswriter and editor at the New Haven Register for 39 years. I knew Mars from the UConn women’s beat, sharing many a meal, ride and press room with him. Mars had the enviable ability to teach without teaching, entertain without entertaining and inspire without inspiring.

I think of Mars without fail anytime I lapse into conversation with a stranger. We were in Miami one night before a UConn game. Great scenery. We were enjoying it. Until a random gentleman sat next to me, engaged in small talk and eventually asked me what I did for a living.

“Sportswriter,” I said.

And then it happened, as it always does. They ask your opinion on a sports topic … and proceed to give you theirs for the next 27 minutes.

Upon leaving, Mars put his arm around me and said, “Let that be a lesson to you. Next time they ask what you do, tell them you’re a ditch digger. Then you can drink in peace.”

Mars was famous for heaving sighs on deadline that could blow up rear tires. He was part of a floor show with the late, great Register writer Tom McCormack, who would accompany Mars on many UConn women’s trips. Tom was, shall we say, high strung. Mars wore a look of horror once when Tom walked into the press room carrying a half-dozen donuts, fearful all that sugar would send Tom into orbit.

Many of us hadn’t seen Mars in some time, testimony to how life happens. And we forget what people mean to us. What they taught us.

“He was always impeccably dressed. He had a habit to pulling the cuffs of his dress shirts out from the arms to his jacket, his way of making sure his outfit was aligned,” said John Altavilla, who covers the UConn women for the Hartford Courant and worked with Mars at the Register for many years. “The guys at the Register came to call it ‘shooting the cuffs.’

“But what I loved most about him was how great a storyteller he was. His roots were as an Eastern League hockey writer, covering the New Haven Blades. He rode the buses, covered games in a ton of rinky-dink towns, wrote about some fabulous personalities. And he loved telling stories about the adventures he had along the way; some more ribald than others, mind you, but stories that left you roaring in laughter in the passenger seat of his car on long trips to New York and UConn.”

And that, really, is the enduring lesson Mars leaves on the profession. We’ve lost our way if we believe it’s about the “where” instead of the “what.” Doesn’t matter if it’s New York or New Hampshire. It’s about storytelling. Late New York Times columnist David Carr said it best: “You go out, find people more interesting than you, learn about something, come back and tell other people about it.”

Mars did that for 39 years. He didn’t need to be a national pundit, or to scream on television or to amass mass followers on Twitter to honor his profession. Nobody else does either. And he did it with a sense of humor, a deadpan and an air that suggested if you ever needed to know how to act in a certain situation, just look at Mars.

I just may strike up a conversation with a stranger today just to tell them I’m a ditch digger.

RIP, my friend. And thanks.

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro.

Twitter: @BCgenius