Season finale: Looking back at active, hard year

It's been a long season, friends, and after this semester, all I feel is tired.

I've hit that part of a college education when you run your face into a wall and hold that moment of insecurity right in front of your face. I realize that after this college thing is all done, I might be just as much of a f**k-up as I was four years ago. That maybe I missed the message and I'm headed down the worn road of mediocrity.

I've been up later at night than ever before in my life, and been up earlier than ever before. I have become one of those students who merely floats from class to class, sort of spewing papers out of my fingertips.

I've made this entire column about running closer and closer to The Edge, writing about the chaos of national wrestling tournaments (and their crazy fans), Augustana's party scene (during Distinguished Scholar's weekend, no less) and maxing out the Mirror credit card on lavish dinners for Norwegian bombshells (and Damon Dotson's bar tab).

I've almost been fired for writing to you people, but what you've got to understand is that I can't stop.

Tired as I might be—lungs pounding from running in every direction—there is a thrill to this whole college thing that is as much of a high as any narcotic you can find.

All around this campus, there are college kids living college lives who are slowly committing suicide through boredom. They run no risks. They take no chances. They are casualties of life, scared to do anything except sit in their dorms and have moderate fun.

But you, you are like me.

You too have been running for the past nine months, learning from professors and friends and hard experiences that have brought you to where you stand now, exhausted but confident that you'll be able to roll with the next hook that comes your way.

The seniors are being jettisoned out into reality, and the freshmen finally have some knowledge under their belts and are looking less green by the day. Everybody else is caught up in the mix, finding their way through this mess just as their predecessors have done before them, but everybody—everybody—is feeling it.

We all are feeling that point where we've finally conditioned our bodies to require minimal amounts of sleep. We have trained our livers to be stubborn enough to handle weekends and ladies nights.

Resilient and headstrong, we have learned how to take notes in one class while simultaneously studying for a test in another, even when we feel like death and are in the midst of a heavy texting conversation, scoping the party scene for later in the night. We run wild.

But the high of running wild comes at an expense. While I might be little more than a sleep-deprived carcass, I am conscious enough to realize that I can't keep this pace up forever, and neither can you.

Your body aches from the sleep you should have been getting but weren't because you were up studying or throwing up or drinking or screwing or playing video games instead of submitting to the one thing a college education has never afforded you: rest.

It's a sick twist of fate that burns us youth, we proud college misfits who have all the channels of an adult with the minds of a perverted teenager.

But, like you, the real chance I've taken is that in all this running, I have forgotten that I have begun to age.

Soon there will be a day when it's not cool to be drunk on a Tuesday night with rock bands. Soon there will be a day when flirting with hot freshmen girls will be creepy. Soon there will be people who stare through this Frankenstein I've created and see nothing more than a childish college burnout who is brutally afraid of growing up so he digs his heels into the foundations of youth, trying to preserve something beautiful by kicking dirt on it.

I want to be boring.

I want to have moderate fun.

I want certainty.

I want to do right, but God, just not right now. That would be too easy.

Hang tough, you tired Vikings, and run wild. I'll see you next year.