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Credit: Howard Wise/JPI (2)

Maybe she didn’t miss as much of his life as we thought! 

The Young and the Restless’ Diane is a terrible mom. Let’s just get that out there right now. We all know it. Jack knows it. Kyle certainly knows it! After all, she faked her death when he was a kid and disappeared for 20 years. (In soap opera time, at least. In real-world time it was only 11!)

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As “Diane tells Kyle,” portrayer Michael Mealor mentioned during his recent appearance on The Talk, “‘I missed all your hockey games!’”

But what if she didn’t miss his hockey games? What if she was just secretly watching over him the entire time and he never realized it?

OK, that’s not quite what happened, but in an eerie case of when, as Mealor put it, “life begets art,” something darn close happened in real life!

“I grew up in Georgia,” he explained to The Talk’s hosts, “and [Susan Walters] was living in Georgia,” back when she was filming Vampire Diaries. “And sure enough her daughters are about my age. We were all in high school the same age. And she saw three or four of my football games because her daughter was in marching band. She was at the games, I always mess with her like, ‘You were the woman with the cow bell!’”

Check out the clip below!

As host Sheryl Underwood pointed out, “It is so eerie that you haven’t seen your momma on the soap opera for 20 years, but she was watching your football games!”

Eerie is certainly one word for it! Or, as Mealor put it, “Small world!”

Of course, we wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what Diane actually had done, since secretly watching her son in high school would have selfishly made her feel a bit better while everyone else just had to keep on mourning!

Take a look at our photo gallery of Kyle Abbott’s messy life — most of which Diane missed!