I just turned 23 yesterday and instead of gaining wisdom, I think I lost something.
Whether it is from this job or just getting a few more gray hairs, there is something that, no matter what I do with the rest of my life, I can never get back.
I can never again worship our sports heroes.
As we grow older, we learn new things and we see problems in a new light. The world itself is not as black and white as we once thought it to be.
I remember the days when I would watch the Milwaukee Brewers and see players like Paul Molitor, Robin Yount and Jim Gantner play during the prime of their careers. They were almost like a deity'to even see them live was a great thrill.
Remember when you played football with your friends? Whenever you were the quarterback and needed that last touchdown to win the game, you were always Joe Montana, Dan Marino or John Elway.
When you played sandlot baseball, you were always Mark McGwire or Ryne Sandberg hitting that last pitch over the fence for a game-winning home run to win Game Seven of the World Series.
What about shooting hoops in the driveway of your home? I remember being Chris Smith of the Connecticut Huskies basketball team in 1990. I was such a fan of that team, it was not funny.
Going back to my father, Larry, the heroes of his time were Hank Aaron, Mickey Mantle and Warren Spahn.
To him, there are no other players that can match their talent. No matter how many home runs Barry Bonds hits, he will never be as good a player in my dad's mind as Aaron was.
If you go back a previous generation, the heroes of the day were \Joltin'"" Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams'the latter almost having a John Wayne-like hero aura around him still today.
The prime age of hero building was the 1920s when the likes of Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones and Red Grange ruled the papers and writers such as Grantland Rice were the voices that people listened to.
But now we know better. With players getting into problems off the field and their antics on the field replayed on SportsCenter every night, we see different sides of athletes that we never saw when we were young. We know more about them than we ever did before.
Working for the media, the hero worshiping has dissolved even more as I interact with athletes from campus and around the nation.
Despite the loss of innocence, I have also gained something. I see athletes now as normal people, with normal lives who just happen to work in an extraordinary job.
Out of all the interviews that I can ever do, there would only be two people that I would get butterflies and nerves about interviewing. One would be Michael Jordan because I remember him when he was truly ""Air"" Jordan in the mid-1980s.
The other would be Brett Favre, because he has a gunslinger mentality that I remember growing up with as a young Green Bay Packers fan.
I yearn for the innocence of youth and the days of getting 21 other people together and playing tackle football for eight hours on an overcast, blustery autumn afternoon, drinking hot chocolate between games and talking about what team was going to win Super Bowl XXI.
Now I am old and with the gray hairs to prove it.
I know I cannot recapture the past 23 years.
But maybe I can visit for a while.
