Kyle Larson took a while to get started. It’s because he started young. He was 21 when he debuted on what is now the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series in the fall of 2013.

It took Larson 101 tries to win. Now he’s won four of the past 36 and finished second nine times during that span. Oddly, all four victories have been at two-mile tracks. The runner-up finishes have occurred at every kind of NASCAR venue except a road course. He did, however, turn in a fourth at Sonoma back in 2015.

Larson has gone from “talented, but it’s too soon” to “talented, but he’s got to learn to close the deal” to “talented, end of story, period.” No question mark.

As the NASCAR regular season winds down, I feel like I’m at the ocean. Water is plentiful, but there’s nothing for me to drink.

My mother would say I’m picayunish. She’s said it all my life, and I had to look up how to spell it. News is everywhere. Yet I find it to be “of little value or account; small, trifling.”

Young, apple-cheeked lads are marching into NASCAR like the junior ROTC on parade out on the academy green, running up the flags and standing at attention. There’s a William Byron here, and an Alex Bowman there, Ryan Preece, Bubba Wallace, everywhere a Daniel Suarez.

It’s not like the revered veterans weren’t already riding off into the figurative sunset astride their figurative Palominos.

Jeff Gordon. Gone. Tony Stewart. Gone. Carl Edwards. Gone. Greg Biffle. Rideless. Dale Earnhardt Jr. Saddling up now.

Those five drivers add up to 215 victories (Gordon 93, Stewart 49, Edwards 28, Earnhardt Jr. 26, Biffle 19) and seven championships (Gordon 4, Stewart 3)

I miss the stock car racing of my youth mainly because I miss my youth.

My hero was David Pearson. He was from up the super highway. Occasionally, my dad bumped into him when he landed his twin-engined plane at the Spartanburg Downtown Airport because Leo Sell, whom my father retained as a crop duster, flew in and out of there, too.

Pearson grew up on a mill hill. They called them hills whether they had any or not. My grandfather worked most of a half century in a mill. I worked at one in the summer. Third shift. I went to college so I wouldn’t work in a mill anymore. Pearson raced stock cars.

In 1994, when NASCAR first held a major race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, it was considered the greatest thing since sliced bread (with apologies to Joey Logano, who vitamin-enriched his several years later).

Now it’s moldy, old bread. Its approval rating is right up there with TrumpCare.

I wrote about every Cup race at Indy except one through 2012. I don’t think last year’s race, won by Kyle Busch, was much different from the first, won by Jeff Gordon. Like so much else in NASCAR, the race went out of style. It went from a big deal to a ho-hum. The first Brickyard 400 had the highest attendance of any stock car race in history. Last year’s race had about 20 percent as many. The world’s most famous race track had over 200,000 empty seats.