RANCHO SANTA FE, Calif.

The comeback was born here, silver spoon in its mouth, in a mansion outside San Diego, amid the spoils and luxuries of Bret Boone’s 14-year major league career. It was surrounded, loved and nurtured by family. It never wanted for any material thing. It was given the space to grow at its own pace.

If you’ve ever wondered: Why do they come back? . . . And if you thought you knew the answers . . . yeah, it’s all those things — an inability to leave the athlete’s life behind, an addiction to competition, a need for validation — but it’s so much more.

Bret Boone’s 2008 comeback attempt with the Washington Nationals, after two full seasons out of the game, may have been born into a world of wealth and tranquillity — a world made possible by a total of nearly $50 million he earned in his career — but it was spawned from darkness. From the descent into the hell of alcoholism and the climb back out. From primal urges — conquering demons, proving something to oneself, gaining closure.

If the athlete’s playing career is life, and retirement is death, Boone — or at least the ghost of him that showed up in 2008 — refused to go into that good night until his career was given a proper burial.

“I struggled for that 18-month period where I was just kind of lost,” Boone, now 40, says. “Your whole life, [baseball] is . . . not exactly what defines you — but it’s all I’ve done my whole life. You’re Bret Boone, the second baseman, and all of a sudden you’re not that guy anymore.”

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