It ends in a bar. Shakespeare’s, to be precise. Blue Moon is in the glasses. We have jobs. We’re going to graduate. Our time here is over.

It was always going to end in a bar, somewhere in the world. Another four-year interval would draw to a close. My friends would graduate from schools around the country, and I’d be somewhere with a drink in my hands and a story to tell of how I got here.

Here’s mine:

Four years ago, I became a senior for the first time, and I just remember wanting, more than anything in the world, to be good at football. I went to the morning workouts in the summers and stayed in the weight room for an additional hour until they kicked me out. I’d run a mile later in the day and study plays throughout the night. This had to work. It was my last year doing this. Something I loved was about to be gone forever.

We got to the first scrimmage. I was playing wide receiver. The quarterback broke a long scramble along the right side, and I turned around to block. An enormous lineman was streamlining at me like a freight train. Our helmets collided. I dropped in a dizzying fall to the turf.

I started to painfully piece a timeline together: My brain was dying. It started to falter as early as the fifth grade, when I was hit by a car and suffered minor brain damage. Football had given me another half-dozen concussions. My memory was fading bit by bit. I feared getting hit in the head on every single play.

I could have kept playing, but suddenly, heartbrokenly, I didn’t want to. I feared losing the one thing that always meant more to me than football. I feared losing the ability to write about it.

When I got to college, I met a man named Elvis Fisher, and he helped me to see the world. I first interviewed the Missouri football captain before an August practice my sophomore year, and all he could talk about was how football meant everything. I could still feel that passion later in the night when news broke that his season was done for the year.

I had to speak to him about it. I had to find a way for two people who got “it” to talk about “it,” the “it” they can hardly describe. I spoke to Elvis for eight weeks as part of a journalism project called “Learning to Fall.” I would later write my cover letters based on that story, hoping to land a job where I could write about football every single day.

Here at college, we’ve spent four years making sacrifices both wise and stupid, but they’ve been to chase something — a feeling, an escape, a future, a happiness that only we can understand.

I’m trying to place mine into writing right now because for the first time in four years, I know it’s with me. It’s a feeling that isn’t going away.

It’s the feeling that comes when you spend months waiting on the one that will change your life, when you sit by the phone on a Friday afternoon and scream at it to justify your every life choice — and then one day, it does.

It’s the feeling you get when you call your grandparents to say you got a writing job with a football magazine, and they break into a dance right there on the phone. It’s the one that wills a Chicago freshman to fist-pump in the middle of health class because he knows his big cousin is moving to the city.

Mostly, it’s the feeling you get when you’ve come full-circle, when you take a job writing about football culture for a magazine years after you gave up football culture because you loved the idea of writing for a magazine just a little bit more. It’s when the path winds to a stop in the place where it began, and you have no complaints — because you’ve taken it absolutely as far as you needed to go.