All along the way, there was one constant: I loved sports. I read the sports page first thing in the morning, often over a bowl of Wheaties-the breakfast of champions, and skinny white dorks-and in front of "SportsCenter." In fact, it quickly became clear that I enjoyed sports media and sports culture as much as I cherished playing sports. I wanted to be Kilborn and Olbermann up there spewing catch phrases by the dozen, being worshipped by kids just like me in every corner of the country.

So I came to Harvard with the dream of turning my experience into a prime role on "SportsCenter" or at the very least, Fox Sports Net. Or, because I favored the printed word, maybe I would become a Mitch Albom or Tony Kornheiser or Dan Shaughnessy.

When I joined The Crimson in my freshman year, and it was the right move for me. I found a community of sports junkies who were as absorbed in statistics and box scores as I was. Becoming a sportswriter forced me to put down the books and get out to the games. Readers of The Crimson would know about a game only through what I told them; it was an instantly gratifying feeling of power, an opiate for my journalistic ego.

Over the next few years, I rose through the ranks each year to become co-editor of this section. I had found my niche on this campus.

But that niche also took me away from what I had set out to do. Career ambition became an obstacle to fun. I had to spend more time inside 14 Plympton laying out pages, managing staff and sitting in long bureaucratic committees listening to uncompromising board heads quibble over miniscule changes to the paper's bylaws. I had lost the thing I sought the most-going to sporting events. And even when I was going to games as a writer, not cheering was the hardest part.

And that is when I started to wonder if this was the path I wanted to be on. Did I want to follow two of my immediate predecessors into working for Sports Illustrated, the Bible of my youth? Did I want to trail overpaid athletes with a tape recorder, hoping I had gotten the crumb of a quote to separate my story from a rival's? Did I want to sit in an office, orchestrating a section from my desk, waiting for my minions to bring their "big scoops" about the contract negotiations for a new shortstop?

In what was roughly a job interview, I had a conversation last summer with John Cherwa, sports editor of The Chicago Tribune. I was waffling between doing news or sports as my first career move out of college. I told him how much I loved sports and how I had long thought I wanted to be a sportswriter and how my recent experience had me wondering.