I knew it was over when he blew the whistle. Five, four, three, two, one. And it sounded. The last intramural game I will ever play at IC, as done as the college career that went with it.

It had to happen at some point, I think. The moment when time ceases to move by seconds and switches to whole days, when you look at a calendar like a cookie jar with fewer and fewer cookies. Every time you look, days seem to be missing, but you don’t know where they went.

Floor hockey was in the Hill Center, but something else was outside. Not a week of finals and then summer vacation, but something as unsettling as a Dr. Seuss book without a rhyme.

It is the end of an era, the question of what comes next — the unknown.

Walk around campus. Amid the newly green grass and blossoming trees, there are teenagers smiling, looks that give away how proud they are to be sophomores. One step up on the hierarchy.

Sophomores and juniors have the same look. Seniors don’t.

Some call the freshmen lucky. They say they’d give anything to do it again. College, that is.

Others can’t wait to see the world through the eyes of a professional whatever-they’re- going-to-be. But left behind is something a 22-year-old can’t understand.

Those same smiling faces used to be me. I know their feelings well because they used to be mine. They were mine for so many years. This feeling I don’t know as well, but I do know someone will step in and replace me next year, and the same goes for every graduate.   

No one’s immune. It’s called the passage of time, and it owns the fourth quarter.

As the final seconds ticked down in the Hill Center, there was a surreal calm that settled over Gym Three. The final score was 5–3 in favor of the other guys, but what in past years might have been anger was instead nostalgia.  

There was nothing but gratitude in the faces that have become more than familiar over four years, and that’s the way it should be. The line between friend and teammate smudged, blurred beyond recognition.   

I don’t know what people will say to each other two Sundays from now. I don’t know what they’re supposed to say, either. In eighth grade someone signed my yearbook, “I hope your life is like a roll of toilet paper, long and useful.” It was easier then.  

I walked out of the Hill Center, maybe for the last time. The rest of my team did too. With the moon overhead, we headed for our cars. There wasn’t much to say.