This column isn’t going to be about all four years of college, only the last three months.

At the risk of sounding lame, I will tell you what happened three months ago. See, I thought I would be finishing out my college days with my on-again, off-again boyfriend of four-plus years who was a viable candidate to be the love of my life. False alarm. We parted ways in a less burn-out, more-fade away manner.

I didn’t remember what my life was like before him. After all, the last time I knew any different I was 17 and in high school. Now I found myself at 22 ready to graduate from college.

But this column isn’t going to be about him. In fact, this column might even spite him.

I had the unexpected opportunity to turn my last three months of college into everything the first 45 months weren’t. I viewed it as my chance to do everything I hadn’t done, to remake myself – and the clock was ticking. To quote loosely the lyrics of Ms. Whitney Houston, it’s been one moment in time when I was more than I thought I could be.

But I didn’t do it alone.

That’s where the people whose names appear in this very newspaper enter. Maybe they knew what they were doing. Maybe they didn’t. But for that, I truly thank each and every one of them. You know who you are.

Most of the other graduating seniors only can post some lame, overused quote on their Facebook profile that says something like “here’s to the nights I’ll never remember with the friends I’ll never forget.” Not me. Oh I’d say that, but as copy desk chief, aka goddess of the written word, all 12,000 of you now are reading my ode to the people who helped me turn what could have been one of the darkest periods in my life into a three-month Stater party.

These are the people who understand when I want to stet my life and can answer the AP style questions I ask during a game of Kings. These are the people who took me to Coldstone, who took me to their hometowns, who took pictures of me at Lake Erie. These are the people who gossip with me late at night, who live with me. These are the people who write me “I love you” notes during long nights in the office, who don’t complain when I drop The Columbus Dispatch into our conversations for the 123,456th time.

These are the people who have helped me pack more fun into the past three months than I’ve had in the past three years, maybe ever. I have 115 Facebook photos to document it.

I may never be in one room with so much raw talent and passion for journalism again. As we fan out to points near and far, I know we may not always be in touch. That’s OK. Certain moments I will never forget. And if our paths cross 20 years from now, we can smile slyly, remembering the crazy nights we shared many years before.

Megan Burgasser is a senior newspaper journalism and copy desk chief for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact her at [email protected].