“Hey Fitz,” I said across the dock, trying to prod him along. “You ready to do that interview yet? The world wants to know all about you.”

Fitzgerald paused. “What makes you think I want the world to know about Larry Fitzgerald?” he answered.

As Fitz prepares for his Hall of Fame induction, that comment popped into my head. It made me think of Fitzgerald’s episode of “A Football Life,” when he paraphrased a Derek Jeter quote.

“If you knocked on his door, he’d open the door and he’d talk to you whenever you wanted to, but you’d never get inside the screen door,” Fitzgerald said. “I’m kind of similar to that. We can have a great relationship but if it gets too close, I’m like, I don’t know if I’m comfortable with it getting any further than this.”

Maybe the screen door remains closed, but it sure felt like, after a 17-year relationship through that screen, everyone got to know Fitz pretty well. I was fortunate to have a front-row seat, to see a first-round draft pick morph into one of the greatest wide receivers in NFL history.

His protective side was up when he first arrived, a 20-year-old prodigy drafted only 24 hours after the news that Cardinals icon Pat Tillman had lost his life. He was guarded initially, his interview answers far from the length and ease at which he eventually gave them. When he made his first game-winning TD catch in the final seconds of a road game in Miami as a rookie, Fitz was so short in his interview session it was awkward – it is amazing to see how he handles himself in such a setting now.

In those days, he didn’t always want to go home in the evening, earning the nickname “Late Night Larry” for sticking around the locker room long after his teammates had left, helping the equipment guys fold towels. He earned good-natured grief from other players when they found he had bought a house with his significant rookie contract but was hesitant in spending too much money to furnish it.

In those early years, Fitz just wanted to play. He wasn’t all that interested in leading. His contribution was as transcendent wide receiver. He was just fine having Anquan Boldin be the spokesman of the wideouts. Fitz has acknowledged being immature and a little entitled.

But like most of us, Fitz went through maturation and metamorphosis.

Even if he didn’t want to pontificate in front of the cameras, he was friendly off the record, and if your kids were around, maybe he’d good-naturedly jab you if they were wearing Cardinals jerseys representing someone other than himself. (Yes, he did that to me, drawing smiles from my young sons at the time.)

He was already a Pro Bowl receiver, but when Todd Haley showed up and all but ripped him for not using his significant size to break tackles and get more yards after the catch, Fitz took it to heart. When the Cardinals needed to ride a superstar to the Super Bowl, Fitz put them on his back in the greatest postseason a receiver has ever had. When Kurt Warner retired and the Cardinals went through a stretch at quarterback where Max Hall and Derek Anderson and Kevin Kolb and John Skelton – among others -- were throwing him the ball, Fitz never rebelled, complained or went into a funk.

“That cemented it for me,” McCown said. “That was probably the moment. That was the first moment where it was like a clutch moment for him. For him to go in the huddle and say, ‘I'm going to catch it.’ That kind of defines Larry. He just wanted a chance to impact the game.”

(The fact he had more than 1,400 yards in 2011 was always to me one of his more amazing feats. His greatest catch few remember came in overtime of that season’s finale, an incomprehensible one-handed stab of a low Skelton dart. But I digress.)

Those on the outside lamented what Fitz would’ve done with good quarterback play the duration of his career. On the inside, when journeymen Brian St. Pierre and Rich Bartel each threw their first NFL TD passes to Fitz, he had the presence of mind to rush the ball back over to each, knowing what it would mean to them.

Carson Palmer solved his quarterback issue. But new coach Bruce Arians wanted Fitz to take on a different role, moving him from outside to inside receiver, with many more blocking responsibilities -- and Fitz resisted at first. Arians even cautioned that Fitzgerald’s days as a 100-reception player were over.

Of course, Fitz surpassed 100 catches in each of Arians’ final three years as Cardinals coach, the two coming together in an emotional embrace in the locker room in Seattle after Arians’ final game. He became the best blocking wide receiver in the league.

The blocking thing was weird. He hated when you credited him for being so good at it. He said he didn’t like to do it. Yet he was good and wouldn’t have let himself be anything less.

What’s more, the immature kid who arrived in the NFL had turned into a mentor, sharing his knowledge with every young wide receiver who came through the doors, from Roberts to Steve Breaston to Early Doucet to Michael Floyd to John Brown.

Some took it to heart. Others did not. But Fitz was there. He connected with Christian Kirk and Trent Sherfield, their bond reaching beyond the age difference.

Conversations with him could be fascinating. Once, he came upon me in the locker room while I was waiting out another player for an interview, and we had a lengthy impromptu talk about life and family, and some of his travels around the world. Another time, during an offseason “media day” when players would get into uniform for various pictures and video needed for the upcoming season, Fitz asked me, earnestly, if I had ever tried to take down 350-pound nose tackle Alameda Ta’amu. Fitz was the one who would tackle teammates and coaches (and me, once) out of nowhere.

But that screen door wasn’t gone. In 2015, I texted him asking for a comment when he signed his new contract. “My quote is that I love you Darren not because you’re a good guy but we share the same bday.” The birthday part was true, although it wasn’t the answer for which I was hoping.

Fitz would insist offseason work and training camp was more of a grind than he’d like, and the offseason stuff, voluntary as it was, was primed to be skipped. No one would have had a second thought, not with a future Hall of Famer. But he was almost always there. Coaches would force him to take days off in camp as he got older, but he was the example, the tireless worker that was always ready to make the spectacular play – and often did – even in a practice where the result did not count.

But that was the thing with Fitz. It all counted. It mattered what he did on the days when games didn’t happen, because it would make him better on the days they did.

Emotion – true emotion – didn’t come out often publicly for Larry. But as the years passed, and his one crushing Super Bowl appearance slid further in the rear view, it showed itself more often. He knew that making a huge catch for a crucial first down would energize his teammates; he knew that jumping up with a primal scream after such a catch would even more so. If it happened to be a home game, the chants of “Lar-RY” echoing through the stadium, it was hard to believe he wasn’t willing his team to victory.

To see him, back to the room, crying into his locker after the 2015 NFC Championship loss, knowing he might’ve lost his last chance to return to the Super Bowl, was heartbreaking.

The statistics got him into Canton. It would’ve been an upset if he wasn’t a first-ballot Hall of Famer. And make no mistake, for all the downplaying Fitz has done through the years, the catches and yards and touchdowns do mean a lot to him. He understands and has a deep appreciation for the game and his place in it.

Right before the 2015 season – coming off two years with Arians of sub-1,000-yard seasons – I asked Fitz about what he thought his legacy would be, and he said “the book has not ended yet.” Flash forward to two weeks later, and I was standing on the sideline at the end of the Cards’ blowout win in Chicago in which Fitz caught three touchdowns. Fitz caught my attention from about 30 feet away. He yelled at me, “Working on my legacy!”

That doesn’t mean it was lip service those last few years when he’d say a championship was all he craved, and that he’d sacrifice for that goal. There were times when Fitz thought the goal might’ve been better achieved if he had seen a few more targets, but he wanted a Super Bowl ring.

Fitz also wanted to get it here, in Arizona. For all the rumors that a contender might deal for him, for all the fans who would beg for the franchise to “free Fitz” so he could win a championship elsewhere, Fitzgerald wanted to be here. He could have left. He did not.

He was part of this community. It, like Minnesota, had become his home. His visits to surprise sick children in the hospital (without anyone even knowing), his connection to local businesses, his purchase of a piece of the Phoenix Suns, his legacy as a player who spent his career with one team, all of that was part of the equation.

He walked in the building as a kid and left as so much more. His connection to the franchise and to its fans was deeply rooted.

“Every time you walk in the stadium it’s humbling,” Fitzgerald once said. “You see hundreds, maybe thousands of people wearing your jersey. Parents wouldn’t allow their children to wear your jersey if they thought you weren’t a guy who was responsible. Those types of things always resonate with me.”

Few players become an icon, but we can see one behind that screen door.

It’s been a journey, Larry Legend.