It was only a dream. It cam to Dale Earnhardt Jr. last month, a few weeks before he was to race in his second Daytona 500, the same race that it took his legendary father, Dale Earnhardt Sr., 20 years to win.

"I'm pretty confident that I'm going to win t Daytona 500. Because I've dreamed about it so much," he said. "You can call me crazy, but I'll be talking to you at the post-race interview, talking about how I did it."

In the dream, he did it the easy way. "Out front all day," he said. "It was so real, it was crazy." And where was his legendary father? "He wasn't there," Earnhardt Jr. said.

Sadly, tragically, when Earnhardt Jr. crossed the finish line in the 2001 Daytona 500 - second, 0.124 of a second behind teammate Michael Waltrip - his father was not there. Dale Sr.'s familiar black No.3 Chevrolet had crashed seconds before the checkered flag, less then half a mile from the finish line, into the concrete outside retaining wall in Turn 4 of Daytona International Speedway. He died instantly.

Suddenly, Earnhardt Jr. had lost the man who meant everything to him. Instead of celebrating Dale Earnhardt Inc.'s 1-2 finish, Dale Jr. crossed the finish line, parked his car at pit row and immediately tried to get to the scence of the crash he'd seen in his rearview mirrow. And this was no dream.

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