Ray, 5, left, and Zia Coleman, 3, play mini-golf in the rain.

It wasn’t the white suit he wore, or the Ferrari he drove, or the sailboat he lived in. It wasn’t even the fact that the actor who played him, Don Johnson, was a former Jayhawk. Simply put, when I was 12, there was something I couldn’t explain about the magic of Det. Sonny Crockett, and the show he starred in, “Miami Vice.”

Unlike me, my father found nothing about it beyond description. “Someday you will think this is the stupidest thing you’ve ever seen,” he informed me one night after I shushed him for talking over a bit of dialogue between Crockett and his ultra-cool sidekick, Rico Tubbs. Time has revealed my old man to have been wrong about a number of things, but this isn’t one of them.

Back then it stung, but these days I recognize the right of the adult in the room to be a buzzkill whenever necessary. I do it all the time with my preschool-age kids, although my advice has less to do with pop culture than foreign objects that don’t fit up nostrils. So I figured I had a few years left before I encountered my son’s version of Sonny Crockett. That was before I ever heard of Matt3756.

Heroes stay larger than life, only the screens get smaller. My parents’ idols were movie stars, mine were on TV, and my kids’ are online. In a bygone era, people may have referred to my son’s new hero as “some goofball from Pennsylvania.” His hometown newspaper, the Ellwood City Ledger, was more generous, sort of, when they called him “a man whose YouTube channel has gone semi-viral.” However you describe him, videos of Matt3756 playing mini-golf with his celebrity sidekick, who in the old days would have been known as “some other guy named Zach,” never get old. At least for the one person in our house obsessed with mini-golf. And all the other people out there who have viewed these videos over a million times.

“Hey there! I’m Matt3756, and you just stumbled upon my channel,” begins an introduction to the 692,002 followers who await Matt3756’s next visit to a Pittsburgh-area arcade, carnival or mini-golf course. He may not sport around LA with Melanie Griffith on his arm like Don Johnson did, but he’s a legitimate star, and small potatoes compared to online celebrities like Shane Dawson, Tyler Oakley and PewDiePie, each of whose bestselling books have flown off library shelves this year.

A book deal may seem like a step up for Shane Dawson, whose empire was built on videos of his own reactions to tasting fast food. Or just for anyone unfortunate enough to be called PewDiePie. But the media establishment needs online celebrities more than they need it. The trick-shot bros known collectively as Dude Perfect now have a show on cable, but probably consider that audience secondary to their YouTube channel’s 10.5 million subscribers, a higher number of viewers than some World Series games have garnered in recent years.

Like my own dad, who thought Don Johnson should shave and wear socks, I wish Matt3756 would straighten his ballcap and pull up his pants. Or at least use a name without a number in it. Most of all, I wish my son’s hero were someone he didn’t just stumble upon.

But I have to admit, Matt3756 knows his way around a claw machine, and watches his language. I should know. My son repeats everything he says (“Sheboingo!” being our favorite Matt3756-ism). And what’s the harm, after all, if my son likes to wind down before his bedtime reading routine by watching a little mini-golf, however disconcerting it is when he allows me “to be” Matt3756 during our own mini-golf games?

It was during such a game I realized that my own message to my dad during the Miami Vice years, echoed now to me by my own son, may have been as harsh to his ears as his disapproval of my favorite show was to mine. For it was news all dads eventually hear, that we are not our sons’ heroes anymore.

To his credit, my dad was wise enough not to make me turn off the television. Instead, he gave me a couple of paperbacks by Joseph Wambaugh, one of his favorite writers, who quit the LAPD of the “Dragnet” era to dramatize its unflattering realities in critically acclaimed books like “The Blue Knight” and “The Onion Field.” My dad could have put a little sugar on it, but as I struggle for an appropriate response to Matt3756, and the many other questionable heroes my kids will worship in the future, I find a hint in what I suspect my dad wanted me to know. He was paying attention.

There was nothing glamorous about the police work they depicted, but I devoured those books, because the truth I sensed in them was way more interesting than Don Johnson peacocking around in a shoulder holster. Thirty years later, I’ve devoted much of my adult life to books, and while I can’t draw a direct line from that moment to now, the connection I shared with my dad around reading led me toward a career as a librarian. I know when I was 12, and in the years to come, I left no doubt as to his status as a fallen hero. I only hope he saw that all the while, I still paid attention, too.

— Dan Coleman is secretary on the board of Dads of Douglas County. He is a part-time stay-at-home dad, but in his other life he is a librarian at the Lawrence Public Library, where he selects children’s and parenting books for the Children’s Room. He can be reached at danielfcoleman@yahoo.com.