‘Golden Bachelorette’ sends Minnesota-raised widower Mark Anderson home

Minnesota-raised Mark Anderson finally got a first date with “The Golden Bachelorette” on Wednesday night. Turns out it was also his last.

Despite connecting over their late spouses, Joan Vassos, the 61-year-old star of the show, sent Anderson, a widower known to “Bachelor” fans as “Kelsey’s hot dad,” back to Louisiana just before the reality TV series’ hometown dates.

“I didn’t see me in our conversations ... and I didn’t feel like I imagined an us,” Vassos told Anderson, a silver-haired 57-year-old.

That’s when the ABC-TV episode turned into “a coronation,” as a USA Today critic put it, potentially placing a “Golden Bachelor” crown atop Anderson’s head.

The Army veteran, who grew up in Hawley, a small northwestern Minnesota town, and went to high school in Fargo, came into the first season of “The Golden Bachelorette” as the youngest and most famous of the 23 men vying for Vassos, a school administrator and widow.

The Louisiana resident first met Bachelor Nation, as it’s known, when his daughter Kelsey brought home her soon-to-be fiancé Joey Graziadei on the latest season of “The Bachelor.” Anderson’s sweet support for his daughter and his love for her late mother, Denise, knocked fans sideways. (His strong jaw didn’t hurt.)

They collectively blushed, posting heart eyes and a common hope: “Make this man the next Golden Bachelor!”

Judging by the screen time and the swelling score, Wednesday night’s episode seemed to continue that push. Anderson spoke at length about Denise, who died in 2018, a decade after her breast cancer was diagnosed. He told fellow contestant Pascal Ibgui that his late wife used to hold open her hand for hummingbirds, who would land on her palm. Before she died, she encouraged Anderson to find another love.

Still, he questioned whether he was doing the right thing until, filming in California, he spotted a hummingbird. “I tried to catch my breath,” Anderson said, “because it’s like she’s there and she’s saying, ‘This is right.’

“The darkness is going away and it’s becoming brighter and brighter and brighter.”

Anderson was the last of Vassos’ remaining suitors to score a one-on-one date. They sipped sparkling wine on a yacht. They shared stories about their late spouses.

But Vassos noted that she and Anderson, who is “soft-spoken,” were still strangely formal around one another. The next day, she came by to break it off, sparing Anderson a brutal rose ceremony. Instead, she gave her four remaining roses to Ibgui, a 69-year-old French owner of a salon; Jordan Heller, a 61-year-old sales executive from Chicago; Guy Gansert, a 66-year-old doctor; and Chock Chapple, a 60-year-old insurance executive from Wichita, Kan.

Anderson’s departure left many of the other men teary-eyed, especially Ibgui, who called him “my best friend.”

Riding off in the car, Anderson gave a goodbye worthy of a “Golden Bachelor.”

“There’s still love in the world. I’ll find mine one day,” he said. “And Joan, she’ll forever have that little corner of my heart.”