James Corrao, a lifelong Bostonian, was 19 when he got a sober. His father had overdosed when he was 9, a loss he’d spent years trying to outrun. But when his girlfriend told him she was pregnant, he had the rare clarity, even at that age, to see that he couldn’t keep going the way he was.

“I knew if I didn’t stop then, I wasn’t going to make it,” Corrao tells TODAY.com, “And I wanted to be someone my daughter could count on.”

More than two decades later, that daughter — Annabelle, now 21, — says that’s exactly who he became. “My dad has always been by my side,” she says in an interview.

Before Annabelle was born in 2004, Corrao took a job as a janitor in the Worcester Public Schools. At the time, he saw it as solid, predictable work, nothing more, nothing meaningful.

But to his surpri

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