At some point while I was on vacation (an actual vacation, not the figurative blog vacation I've been on since the Sugar Bowl) this blog turned four years old.
There's something fitting about that. In college sports you get four years to leave your mark and then you move on and let the next group make their mark during their time. The same goes for me and this blog.
As some of you may have noticed, my posts have been very few and far between since football season ended and there are a few reasons for it. The time I have to devote to this blog started disappearing a little over a year ago. Life changes came fast and furious for me in 2011 and I realized that this past football season would be the ultimate test of whether or not I could continue devoting the proper amount of time to this blog to make it worth a damn.
Somehow, I managed to get through the 2011 season, even though the quality and quantity of posts were not nearly what I wanted. Trudging through those 14 games burned me out which is why you didn't see a whole lot out of me after the Sugar Bowl.
When it was time to sit down and start churning out posts again nothing happened. It wasn't necessarily because I couldn't write. I just didn't want to do it. For the first time since I learned to write I had no desire to do so. I didn't want to write about the overhauled offensive line, I didn't want to write about recruiting, I didn't want to write about anything. So I didn't.
I said my piece over the last four years and now it's time for someone else to say theirs. I started this blog, but just because I'm eventually not going to be the lead writer doesn't mean it's going to die. Someone else is going to come along and lend their unique voice to it.
I'm sure I'll be back every now and then to contribute something. It'll be the blogging equivalent of when guys like my hero, Will Furrer, come back to Blacksburg to read the Hokies Respect bullshit to the crowd right before Enter Sandman. Except instead of telling you not to get drunk and throw things, I'll tell you to get drunk and throw things, that Shane is the future of the football program and that Seth is a horrible basketball coach.
So as my time as this blog's lead writer eventually draws to a close, I just want to take time to say thank you. Without people reading and commenting on this blog I wouldn't have kept doing it and probably would have gone insane. As I've told people before, I started blogging because it was cheaper than therapy and the more miserable I got in the first couple years of the blog's life, to me the better the blog became.
I have made some amazing friends in the process of doing this blog and running its twitter feed, including Joe who suggested the remarkable musical selection that accompanies this post. I look forward to keeping up with you guys both through that outlet and at games.
I've enjoyed nearly every minute of writing this blog. And while I'm ready for my time running it to be over, I've been extremely humbled by the number of people who took time to read and even reach out to me to talk Hokies. Here's hoping that part will continue.
Thank you and Go Hokies,
furrer4heisman