I would never have believed you if you told me coming into this year that Northwestern men’s basketball would take down a number one team and win an NCAA tournament game. As much as my sportswriter side loves when I have the story already most of the way done by the time the final buzzer sounds, the excitement of a game that comes truly down to the wire is so much better. In those last few moments, players have to trust each other and themselves before one finally takes a shot at the game-breaking play.

I took that first shot of my own when I chose to switch into Medill after coming into Northwestern as a theater major. I’d had two good quarters with the Daily, but that’s not a lot of time to base the rest of your life on.

But jumping in and committing to the Daily and to working in sports is one of the best and most fun decisions I’ve ever made. The Daily gave me so many opportunities I never imagined, and so many of them popped up unsuspectingly.

When I joined the Daily gameday staff and traveled down to North Carolina with my dad to cover our matchup with Duke, Northwestern lost. (They did a lot of that that year.) Right after the press conference ended, I met up with my dad to travel back to my grandparents’ house and finish my story.

I found him sitting alone in the stands, Ted Lasso-style, and he asked if I still had any interest in going to the UNC-UVA game twenty minutes away. We got there just before halftime, were basically right on the field and had an absolute blast. (So sorry to my editor at the time who got my story many hours later as I wrote it in the car on the way back home, but absolutely no regrets.) 

To fully experience those spontaneous, joyful moments sports brings, sometimes I had to not come into the newsroom! That same gameday quarter, I wrote a rapid recap in the stands with my friends instead of in the press box because I wanted to experience it at least once that year. The story was still in on time that day, so I’ll take that as a win.

As the few days remaining in my time in college tick by, the Daily memories that I keep closest to my heart aren’t the ones where I covered a perfectly normal game in a perfectly normal manner (even if that’s what I’m hoping for when I sit down in the press box). They’re the adventures I took in New York City with Joanne Haner and Jacob Fulton after Stephen Colbert got COVID the night we were supposed to see him live. They’re failing spectacularly at one of the basketball commercial break games with Josh Hoffman and John Riker. They’re saying yes to things, even if they might take time away from our more serious journalism. The Daily taught me to take my work seriously, and to have confidence in it, but also to have fun and be spontaneous. I hope I’m not done making those last-minute memories with these people just yet.

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Twitter: @gablcarroll