Out of a cloudless Florida sky a roaring, Technicolor tornado seem to descend upon this beach community. A mad, 190-mph counterclockwise swirl, promising nothing but broken dreams and twisted metal, that’s what those last 20 laps of Sunday’s Daytona 500 amounted to.

In the confusion of such a chaotic scene, it’s understandable if the pages of NASCAR’s script for this day got blown away.

The departing-legend-wins-his-last-Great-American-Race story was forever lost in the storm.

Instead, all that was left behind was some previously rejected first draft, a rather flimsy tale that left disbelieving viewers to wonder: Does that downy-cheeked fellow in Victory Lane even have a learner’s permit?

Everyone loves a great last act. John Wooden winning his 10th championship coaching his final game; Pete Sampras bowing out with a U.S. Open title; Bobby Jones retiring on the heels of a Grand Slam. It is an opportunity so seldom granted the greats. Coming to this day as the pole sitter, the retiring Jeff Gordon had taken dead aim at just such a charmed conclusion.

Instead, Sunday belonged to the second youngest Daytona 500 champion ever, 24-year-old Joey Logano, a mere babe whose youth seemed to work against him only when it came time to consider how to properly celebrate a breakthrough victory.

“To be honest, I don’t know how to party,” said the driver who spent so much of his career south of the legal drinking age. “Hopefully someone on my team knows how to.”

At the race’s end, a starkly contrasting scene played out on the Daytona International Speedway front stretch. While Logano cut victory donuts with his car at the finish line, Gordon was slowly driving his wounded ride the wrong way on pit row, having been caught up in a crash in his last Daytona 500 lap.

The great part of this 500 was a perfectly tame affair, with sentimental favorite Gordon taking the point for a majority of those non-threatening laps. No one led for more revolutions Sunday than the four-time Cup series champion (87 of 200 laps). The vagaries of the Daytona draft had shuffled Gordon back off the lead in the second half of the race, leaving him more vulnerable to the madness to come.

For on a restart with but 50 miles left, it all got serious in a rush.

Watching that finish, cars bunched like sardines in a tin, racing three wide against all instincts of self-preservation, there was no question remaining as to why Gordon is so ready to retire. Sunday was a powerful reminder to walk away from this sport while he is able.

For much of the closing drama, Gordon was stuck in the middle of the three-wide racing, the most claustrophobic position. Back where he was, bunched together for a two-lap sprint following a late yellow flag, it almost was inevitable that he would be caught up in the wreck that came on the backstretch of the final lap. The pole-sitter ended up finishing 33rd.

“I’m not going to miss those final laps. That was just crazy,” an otherwise happy-to-be-here Gordon said afterward.

Meanwhile, Logano had positioned himself out front, away from the eye of the automotive tornado. Not to say he wasn’t a bit nervous as he idled on the track, workers collecting some wreckage, preparing for a green flag-white flag-checkered flag finish.

“Once you get over the fact you’re about to throw up you can figure out how to try to win the race,” he said. And he did that masterfully (doing the figuring, not vomiting).

Gordon really has no one but himself to blame for Logano’s victory. This generation of child racer was all inspired by Gordon’s early-age success. He begat this moment. Logano openly idolized the Rainbow Warrior during his formative years in Connecticut.

Logano made his Sprint Cup debut at 18, and struggled so with Gibbs racing that he was shown the door four years later. “There’s no secret I got thrown into this series too young,” he says now.

Who was it that Logano went to for counsel during this difficult time? Who was it that helped keep him hopeful and focused? Gordon.

“Every time I asked he had something for me,” Logano said of Gordon earlier this year.

Even before that, Gordon was goosing him. As a 7-year-old midget car driver, Logano was interviewed by the hometown Hartford (Ct.) Courant. In that long-ago clip, it was suggested that one day, Logano would be Jeff Gordon’s worst nightmare.

Seventeen years later, here we are, having realized an inconvenient dream if not a full-blown nightmare.

On to Atlanta, where next Sunday NASCAR has the second of 34 chances to stage a proper farewell.