At Fenway Park on Monday night, I didn’t have to listen long to hear someone call Xander Bogaerts a hero. He had hit a grand-slam home run that put the Red Sox ahead of my Kansas City Royals 6-3 on a cold and rainy night.

The score and the Red Sox victory over the Royals are not the point. The point is that Bogaerts is a good baseball player. But he is not a hero. Google his name, though, with the word “hero,” and you’ll find plenty of references to him as “hero.”

Let me stay with sports for a second to parse this word “hero.”

Arthur Ashe said, “True heroism . . . is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.” Ashe, a tennis star, died of AIDS he got through a blood transfusion. He may have been a hero, too, as his death nudged medical folks to start testing donated blood for HIV.

Taking from Ashe and others, I would say that heroism means risking something or even yourself to benefit or even to save someone else, usually disregarding the risk.

Two things strike me about heroes. Most are also humble and mutter something along the lines of, “I just did what anyone else would have done.” But anyone else didn’t. The hero did. And, they abound among us, even though we may tend to think of heroism as something that happens somewhere else.

Just look at the heroes in Auburn and Lewiston who, on April 24, jumped into the roiling Androscoggin River to try to save 5-year-old Valerio McFarland. First among them, his 10-year-old brother, Maxim, and his father, Jason McFarland, and the boys’ 8-year-old sister. Rescuers who went in after them pulled all but Valerio from the water.

You needed only to see the picture of seven first responders carrying Maxim on a stretcher up the steep river bank to an ambulance to realize that the circle of heroism was cast wide that day. Or to read Mark LaFlamme’s column on Wednesday about the thousand points of heroism at Bonney Park.

Examples abound. Here are a couple from around here.

Bob Millay is a retired school administrator and teacher who lives in Chesterville. On Oct. 18, 2016, he was driving up the Whittier Road in Farmington when his passenger saw a mobile home burning. Millay returned to the fire and he and Terry Kenniston, his passenger, ran to the fire. A 14-year-old boy was outside, trying to get back into the burning house to save his animals. Kenniston retrieved all the pets from the fire, except the boy’s lizard. The dogs saved included 10 puppies.

The two men not only saved the pets, they kept the boy from running back into the fire. Needless to say, Kenniston went into the burning house at great risk to his own safety.

Millay is my friend. He fits perfectly my description of hero: He insisted he just did what anybody else would have done and he is just another guy from around here. We’ll never know whether he was the only one to stop of several who drove by the fire.

Another local hero is my younger son, Chris Neal. In 2000, he and his girlfriend, now wife, Rachel Cormier, lived on Oak Street in West Farmington, on the third floor of a house converted into three apartments with a garage that had been converted into a fourth. Someone disposed improperly of ashes, and a fire started in the wooden stairway.

Chris and Rachel smelled smoke. Chris ran down the stairs, while Rachel waited to see if the stairs were passable or whether she would have to go out a window. Chris alerted the other tenants, ran back to the top floor and led Rachel to safety. No one was hurt.

Those tenants were saved by the action of a hero. And I am reminded of Chris’s heroism on humid days. Some of his fire-damaged belongings, including several guitars, are in my basement. I smell the wood smoke when the air outside is heavy.

Most people who win sporting events are stars, not heroes. But here are a few heroes from that world. Joanne Boyle quit last month as head women’s basketball coach at the University of Virginia. That is one of the top programs in the country, and Boyle was at the peak of her powers and success. She had won at the University of Richmond and at the University of California. (An aside. Boyle was a finalist for the women’s basketball coaching job at the University of Maine when Joanne Palombo McCallie left in 2000.)

Boyle didn’t quit UVa. under fire. She quit out of love. She has adopted a 6-year-old girl, named Ngoty, from Senegal. Ngoty needs her attention more than do the Cavaliers players. So, she sacrificed her career to take care of a little girl. They are traveling back to Senegal this summer so Ngoty can stay in touch with her roots.

A couple of others from sports are Roberto Clemente, a Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder, who died in a plane crash taking supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. And Pat Tillman, an Arizona Cardinals lineman, who became an Army ranger and was killed in Afghanistan. Neither had to leave his living room. Both died trying to help others.

Around here, just look about you to find some of the literally hundreds of heroes, folks who sacrifice their well-being and even their safety for others. Single parents, most of whom are women, fit the category neatly. I was reared after age 10 by a single mom. I know several single moms. Grandparents who rear their grandbabies because mom and/or dad has fallen down the rabbit hole of drug use. Parents who change their work shifts so one can work days and at night tend a child who has a long-term illness while the other works nights and cares for the child by day. They are heroes, every one.

Many a ball player is a star. But not a hero, at least not on the ball field.

Bob Neal learned from his son and others what a real hero is.

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