SEOUL -- Yu Darvish and the San Diego Padres’ travel party landed at Incheon International Airport outside Seoul at 1:32 a.m. local time on Friday, after an exhausting 13-hour, 23-minute flight, with mere days to adjust before his Opening Day assignment against the Dodgers in the Seoul Series.

Still, less than 11 hours later, Darvish escaped the throngs of fans and cameras mobbing the team hotel to duck away to a small coffee shop and reading room tucked away in an unassuming residential neighborhood of aging midrise apartments in the Seocho district of Seoul.

That’s where he gave “Future Mind” owner Kwang-Hee Lee the shock of his life.

“I was just working as usual at the cafe with my wife, around lunchtime,” Lee told MLB.com in Korean. “Since it's lunchtime, I'm diligently working. I was doing something in the corner, and my wife suddenly started saying, ‘Honey! Honey! Whoa! Whoa!’ And I was like, ‘What? What? What's the matter?’ And [I saw him and] just went, ‘Ahhhhhhhh!’”

You see, this was a day of which Lee had dreamed -- but dared not believe could actually happen -- for 10 years.

Since Darvish became his idol in 2014, Lee had exchanged replies on Twitter (now X) with the star pitcher, had been sent one of his gloves and even twice unsuccessfully traveled to the United States to meet Darvish, but they’d never actually met -- until Darvish took it upon himself to walk through that cafe door for an hourlong visit on Friday afternoon.

“We've been friends for a long time,” Darvish said, as translated from Japanese. “He went to Texas [to see me] as well, and for a long time, I'd been keeping in touch with him. I saw this opportunity to go to his cafe, and he's really a great friend. He and his wife were a really nice couple.”

It’s been a year full of uncertainty and hard work for Lee, an earnest and determined native of the coastal city of Busan who left a decade-long position at an architectural firm to open this charming cafe in January as a family venture with his wife.

He’s been a baseball fan since his youth and deeply admired Darvish’s slider, with his love of Darvish becoming secure around the time the right-hander pitched in the 2014 All-Star Game. With nobody to catch his pitches, Lee would practice throwing sliders like Darvish by throwing baseball after baseball against a wall.

Their interactions started when Lee popped into Darvish’s mentions on X the following year to ask about the slider grip -- and he got a reply telling him how to focus his grip around his middle finger. In 2016, Darvish posted that he’d gotten a glove made that didn’t quite fit him, so Lee took a chance and replied that he was a huge fan in Korea who would cherish and protect the glove if Darvish really didn’t need it.

Lee was at work when he saw a direct message notification pop up on Instagram.

“Huh? ‘Darvish?’” Lee read. “I was stunned. I just didn't believe it. My hands started trembling, and I replied, ‘Are you really Darvish? Are you for real? Are you the real Darvish?’ He replied, ‘Yes, it is!’ And I started screaming.”

Darvish was checking in to ask Lee’s address, and Lee replied with his office address, since he didn’t want the package to be delivered to an empty apartment while he was at work. And somehow, a small box actually did arrive at his office -- and there was simply no way he could focus after that, waiting to open the box with his wife, who would soon accompany him on a trip to Arlington to watch Darvish pitch that September.

“My hands just couldn't do work anymore, and it felt like time just stopped moving,” Lee said.

He clutched the box tight on the subway until he got home, at which point he was eagerly ready to cut it open to reveal the blue Spring Training jersey and red glove contained within -- but caught himself.

“You know how the sender and recipient are listed on the box?” Lee said. “I saw how Darvish's name and my name were listed together, and I didn't want to cut through it. So I flipped the box upside down and cut it open really carefully.”

In September, the couple flew to Houston, then Dallas, for Lee’s first chance to watch his idol pitch in person.

He remembers wandering over to the Rangers' bullpen against the A’s and, at last, getting the chance to see Darvish in the flesh. Lee was so moved that he started sobbing -- but he dared not call out, forgoing his chance to actually exchange words with Darvish despite having flown across an ocean to do so.

“At that point, I'd been so physically close to Darvish, but I absolutely didn't call out to him or yell to him because he was preparing to start, and I really didn't want to bother him,” Lee said. “I didn't do anything, I just watched with tears streaming down my face.”

Lee made another trip to the States in 2023 -- this time, to Arizona for Spring Training -- but found that Darvish had already left for Japan to pitch in the World Baseball Classic.

That’s the context after which Lee messaged a video to Darvish ahead of this Seoul Series. Given the price of tickets and the competition for them -- along with it being the nascent stages of his new cafe -- Lee quickly gave up on the idea of actually going to a game. So, he recorded a video message and posted it to X, tagging Darvish, inviting the pitcher to visit his cafe any time -- and Darvish messaged back to him that it would make him happy if the two could meet in Seoul.

And that brings this story to Friday, when Lee had stayed up late to watch the footage of the Padres’ plane landing in Incheon and Darvish arriving with his San Diego teammates. He didn’t believe that Darvish’s words were just meant to appease him; having followed Darvish for 10 years, he truly believed the message carried weight.

When Darvish walked through that door, having gone out of his way to fulfill that promise, Lee’s faith in the man he’d admired for a decade was vindicated.

“Of course it feels like a dream,” Lee said. “It's even less believable than a dream.”

It wasn’t just a surface-level visit, either. Darvish ordered an iced latte and stayed an hour to converse with Lee, who took Japanese classes in college and is thus fluent in the language. Lee was stunned when Darvish asked him about the days when Lee would throw the ball against the wall, mimicking his slider, and he was even more shocked when Darvish asked if Lee had found the time to fix up some issues he’d been having with the cafe space.

Lee dared not ask Darvish to sign his collection of jerseys -- he did anyway -- and Darvish finally worked with Lee firsthand on how to throw that slider that had first drawn the Korean man’s interest.

“As we talked, it was just an overwhelming feeling of reuniting with someone you'd known for a long time and just catching up about what had happened in that time,” Lee said. “He's someone that I'd yearned to meet, but it wasn't like I didn't know what to do when we actually met. It was such a comfortable, enjoyable conversation.”

When asked if he had any future plans to see Darvish again, Lee said he did not -- that this experience alone was already more than he could have asked.

“I feel like if I thought, 'OK, now that I've met him, I should do this and that and meet him again,' that would be selfish, almost like greed,” Lee said. “At this point, Darvish has done more than his part for me. I can't possibly hope for more. I'm so content with it. The term ‘enough’ almost understates it. I'm so content. I don't have other plans to meet him again, but maybe if I work hard and earn more money, I could travel to San Diego to watch a game.”

He won’t need to wait that long, because this story has an even happier ending: A few hours after this interview on Tuesday, a generous patron gifted a disbelieving Lee one ticket to the game.

He’ll close the cafe around lunchtime on Wednesday and make the trek over to see his friend pitch for the first time in eight years.

The tears are sure to flow again -- and Lee’s connection to the man on the mound will have an added meaning that he couldn’t ever have thought possible.