The last four years have gone by so fast — 97 mph on I-85 fast — that I haven’t had much chance to sit down and reflect.

In between the final exams, papers, award ceremonies, end of an internship and ongoing job hunt, there’s the parties, $2 beer nights and two-hour dinner seshes at Chipotle. It’s a lot, and it’s moving way too fast, but it’s really just an encapsulation of my four years at SU and The Daily Orange.

Everything went by so quickly — I can still vividly remember move-in day, August 2020, and the first time I stepped in-house a few weeks later. Snap your fingers, and I’m done with college, writing a hack.

College flew by like those D.O. road trips always did. All of us on sports staff know about them — driving eight, nine, even 10 hours to cover a 2-3 hour game, staying in a beat-up motel, then making the drive home the next morning so you could make it to class on Monday.

All you can think about while you’re on the road is how much time is left to kill before you’re back in Syracuse. But when you look back on those trips months — years — later, you realize the true joy, the real memories, came while you were in the car, talking with a friend or two about everything from nut grafs to relationships to career goals.

When I think about covering this year’s Syracuse-Georgetown game in D.C., I don’t think about how many points Judah Mintz scored or how much SU won by. I think about the seven hours driving with one of my closest friends, the steak and risotto dinner we had with my parents and the random college game we watched on the basement TV later that night. When I think about traveling to last year’s ACC Tournament, I don’t initially think about Wake Forest’s buzzer beater or Jim Boeheim’s final press conference. I think about another close friend sleeping on an air mattress in my grandparents’ living room and getting a hefty speeding ticket on the way home.

I could go on and on and on: the Motel 6 near Virginia Tech that lacked heat, blankets or running water; the pink bedroom in Hartford; the “snowstorm” in Durham; the golf simulator and movie screen in a luxurious suburban Pittsburgh basement; etc. Sharing those memories with a friend or two is worth a hell of a lot more than covering games for “free” and interviewing players and coaches.

Traveling for coverages meant more than writing a gamer, getting five hours of sleep and coming back home. It meant meeting people, getting to know them — and often, their families too. And now I realize the time on the road was really a metaphor for time in college — or even life. While driving, you always want time to fly by and get onto the next thing while not enjoying what’s in front of you that minute.

It’s like the reminder of Thomas Rhett’s “Sixteen”: to enjoy the present instead of always looking toward the future. At the end of the song, a 25-year-old Rhett is sitting and laughing about how all that he used to care about was turning 16, then 18, then 21, wishing he could go back in time. There was always something bigger and better to get to, until the realization that the best days were actually in the past. I guess maybe that point of realization has arrived a little bit earlier for me.

In the fall I wrote an obituary on Chris Snow, a legendary figure at The D.O. who passed away after a lengthy public battle with ALS. It’s easily the most impactful and emotional story I’ve ever worked on. I asked all of Chris’ friends what their favorite memories were with him and in college. The most common answer: road trips. Whether it was driving through a snowy I-81, sleeping in fleabag motels near Madison Square Garden or drinking and running fly routes on South Beach, that’s what stands out to those D.O. alums about their college years, two decades later. As Jeff Passan put it, “The best D.O. trips for me were always the ones where I was with another writer.”

If you’re reading this, you’re likely a younger sportswriter at The D.O. trying to figure everything out. You probably still have plenty of road trips and college days in front of you. My advice: enjoy every minute of that eight-hour drive to Blacksburg, that red-eye train to South Bend, that bumpy flight into Greenville-Spartanburg. See the value in who you’re with — not necessarily what you’re doing or where you are. Life is about the who, and if you’re spending your time in college with The D.O., you’ve surrounded yourself with great people.

The D.O. has provided me with opportunities I dreamed of when I was younger: interviewing Boeheim, covering top-25 Syracuse football games, winning awards, internships in sports (and maybe even a job!), etc.

But more importantly than any of that was the opportunity to meet a group of people I hope to call friends forever.

Enjoy the road, kids. You’re driving a lot quicker than you realize.

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Connor Smith was a senior staff writer for The Daily Orange, where his column will no longer appear. He can be reached at csmith49@syr.edu and on X @csmith17_.

Published on May 2, 2024 at 7:58 am