Life comes at you fast.

When I think about my time at The Badger Herald, that phrase sums it up to a tee.

I started my sophomore year, covering any sports story the editors at the time were willing to give out. I then got my first beat covering the women’s soccer team in the fall of my junior year. Eventually, I worked my way up and became a sports editor — the position I held this year.

At first, being an editor seemed pretty intimidating. Piled on top of that, I was now covering the football and men’s basketball teams here at Wisconsin. At times, the expectations and pressures that came with that were almost too much. Life really was coming at me fast. To be honest, I didn’t feel like I was qualified for the job.

But as I spent more time at the Herald and became more comfortable with the people I was working with and the job I was doing, so too came the feeling of being qualified to cover two of the top teams in all of collegiate athletics.

I’ve been able to do things this past year I’ll have with me for the rest of my life, and quite frankly, these will be some of the top moments of my life. Covering the football and men’s basketball teams, I’ve gone to Northwestern (where I got stuck in an elevator and had to call the fire department), Iowa City (bless your heart Iowa), Indianapolis for the Final Four and Big Ten football championship game (which probably won’t be a top memory, let’s be honest) and Los Angeles for the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight.

But while those road trips in itself were worth the time, it was the people that I traveled with that made them truly memorable. And that’s how my time was at the Herald. I’m not going into the journalism field when I graduate, and while I’m proud of the work I’ve done here — for many, countless hours — what I’ll take with me the most is the people that I got to spend all those hours with, whether it be in the office or on a plane at 37,000 feet.

There were many times during all of those trips and while I was on the beat these past two semesters where I’ve sat back and realized life does come at you fast. I’ll never forget walking around the USC campus late one night during the Sweet 16 and thinking, “What am I doing here?” A year ago, I was sitting at home in Madison. Now, I’m out in Los Angeles covering the best team in college basketball.

I had a lot of those “what am I doing here” moments this past year, whether it was interviewing the top running back in college football, top player in college basketball or sitting and working alongside sports journalists at the Final Four who I’ve been reading my entire life.

And for all of those “what am I doing here” moments, each and every time I felt just as blessed that the Herald put me in that position. I truly can’t thank the Herald enough for those opportunities.

My time at UW, thankfully, isn’t over just yet. I’ll be returning to school for one more semester before graduating in December. But, as I have been my entire life, it’s time for me to be a Badger fan once again.

I’ll cherish the experiences I had in the press boxes at Camp Randall and the Kohl Center forever, but, as cliché as it may sound, putting on my favorite Badger shirt instead of dress clothes, drinking some beers with my friends on a perfect fall afternoon and jumping around in the student section sounds like a pretty damn good time too.

And relaxing on a fall afternoon at Camp Randall will be a lot easier to do knowing the sports section will be in good hands — probably the best hands it could be in.

So, thanks again to everybody I’ve worked with the past three years for making this the most fun year of my college career while making me improve as a writer, coworker and person. Thanks to my parents and family for getting me to this point and being my most devout readers. Thanks to my other two sports editors for basically being the brothers I’ve never had and for sharing so many memories with me the past year. And finally, thanks to Wisconsin athletics for kicking ass all season and making this a year I’ll never forget.

Maybe now that my time at the Herald is done, life won’t come at me quite as fast. But if it does, what I’ve gone through the past three years with the Herald will no doubt give me the tools to attack it head on.