Game Guy sets aside his controller for a moment to recall a missed opportunity.

Because once upon a time, he almost met the great, now late, American writer David Foster Wallace.

Well, “almost” is stretching it a bit. Game Guy was driving through Normal, Ill., one day in the mid-1990s around the same time Wallace taught there at Illinois State. This was just weeks after Game Guy had finished reading Wallace’s weighty achievement, “Infinite Jest,” a 1,067-page fiction masterwork about the inadvertent pursuit of unhappiness

This book consumed Game Guy’s life for the better part of a month, taking up all the time he didn’t spend eating and breathing. “Infinite Jest” is a book with considerable insight written with considerable talent, as are all of Wallace’s works. But “Jest” tops them all — even crusty old Time magazine ranked it among the 100 best American novels of the past half-century.

It’s a book so good that Game Guy just had to meet the author. That was problematic, however; Game Guy was living in Florida at the time. But circumstances soon put Game Guy in a car traveling from deep southern Illinois to Chicago and through Normal. (The drive reminded GG of Wallace’s on-the-money gut-buster about the Illinois State Fair, which can be found in one of his later books, a collection of essays called, “A Supposedly Fun Thing Thing I’ll Never Do Again.”)

Game Guy had done his homework before this drive; he knew where exactly on campus Wallace kept an office, though he wasn’t sure about the office hours. He figured maybe he’d just drop in, get lucky and meet the man.

Well, as you can guess, that didn’t happen. Another set of circumstances surfaced during the car trip that permitted Game Guy to only glimpse Wallace’s office window — or what Game Guy assumed was the correct window — as he hurried past. So, instead of meeting greatness, he sped past its office.

And now, Wallace is gone. He was found hanged in his California home late Friday. He had been teaching creative writing at Pomona College.

Game Guy hasn’t had any car trips that took him past Pomona College, though he still harbored the insane hope of just dropping in on Wallace some time and saying hello.

Now that’ll only happen through Wallace’s work. I’m sure he would have wanted it that way.