'Excuse me, do you know where any [statistics] books are?" I turned to my right and saw a short man with a pointed chin and fluffed, charcoal hair.
"Huh?" I responded, dumfounded.
And with that, my dialogue with Detroit Free Press sports reporter and best-selling author Mitch Albom came to an anticlimactic close.
I was working as a press room attendant at the Sixers-Pistons playoff series two weeks ago. By chance, I ran into the contemporary author I most admire.
But as I look back, the question is inescapable: Was it really chance? From what I know of Albom through reading The Five People You Meet in Heaven, I doubt he thinks it was chance. My time with the press, after all, qualified me to work in the Sixers' press room.
It was this fatalistic sentiment that hit me as I reflected on my time at The Daily Pennsylvanian.
Last spring, I left the DP's sports department after nearly three years of service. I was exceedingly bitter about not being sent to cover the 2004 NCAA wrestling championships. Wrestling, after all, had been my beat for two years.
But as I prepare to leave Penn, there is no room for resentment. That stuff is baggage, and unless you chuck it early in the journey that is life, it will only grow bigger down the road.
Now, what strikes me is what I have found through re-examining the baggage. There were, in fact, reasons for my time at the DP, regardless of how it ended.
Working for DPOSTM -- the sports department, the "DP's Only Staff That Matters" -- I learned how to be a college student and a more complete person.
I can't even begin to describe the exhilaration I felt as I walked back to the Quad after finishing my first article -- a short piece about the suspension of athletics in the wake of September 11. Coming from a public high school in Ohio, it was as if I'd made it to the big time.
Thank you, Jason Bodnar, my first sports editor, for giving me early opportunities to write and confidence in my journalistic abilities.
My first beat came soon thereafter with the men's fencing team. Walking into their practice room as a wide-eyed freshman was intimidating, but they treated me with dignity. They also provided some of the most honest interviews and most humorous quotes I ever received. They made work fun.
Many thanks here, especially to Coach Micahnik and foils Jeff Breen, Yale Cohen, Andy Radu and Steve Gavalas.
And then there was the Kamin Cup, where my DPOSTM brethren and I tangled annually with the rest of the editors and writers in a game of touch football. Journalists are pretty solitary creatures, but on these days, we became a team.
I am grateful to those at the DP who made me feel like a teammate. Amy Potter, who stayed positive no matter the situation. Lance Stier, who always had something offensive -- and hilarious -- to say. Dan McQuade, who was undoubtedly the most helpful person on staff.
And while I'm feeling sentimental and talking about teams, I'd also like to thank the wrestling team. When I was given the beat my sophomore year, I was scared. This was one group of athletes I didn't want on my bad side, and as a journalist, it would be easy to fall into that trap.
But two years on the wrestling beat completely changed my perception of them and their sport and left me with many fond memories.
Of course, that's also where my career at the DP and as a journalist ended. As is common in life, disappointments are never too far from successes, and vice-versa.
As Five People demonstrates, all lives are interconnected -- we all learn from one another, even if it's through several degrees of separation. At the end, goes Albom's story, five people will explain to each person why he lived -- the unconscious impact he made on others, and others made on him.
There are reasons why God elects that we must taste both the good and the bad.
When it all ends one day and I go to heaven, it won't surprise me if one of the five people I meet is from the DP.
Alexander Eppstein is a 2005 College graduate from Toledo, Ohio.
