In my grandma and grandpa’s living room of their small house in Camp Point, Ill., in March of 2005, my family gathered around a television to watch Dee Brown, Deron Williams and Luther Head attempt to carry the No. 1 overall seed Illinois Fighting Illini to their first Final Four since 1989.

I was five years old when the 2004-05 Illinois basketball team romped across the entire country taking no prisoners as they pounded foe after foe by double digits. In all honesty, I don’t remember too much about that team. I was only five years old, so, please, provide me with some sympathy.

But one vivid memory I have from the greatest season in Illinois basketball history is quitting on the Illini with my dad. With four minutes left in the game, Bruce Weber’s team trailed the third-seeded Arizona Wildcats by 15 points.

Fed up with the frustrating play of the Illini, my father – a December 1990 graduate of Illinois – and I retreated to the cold, dark basement. We either couldn’t watch our favorite team go out in embarrassing fashion or we couldn’t handle seeing the Wildcat lead continue to increase…. until neither of those things happened.

Against – literally – against all the odds, Illinois found a way to claw their way back into the game. As the Arizona lead shrunk smaller and smaller, my dad and I were summoned back upstairs into the living room where we saw Williams’ famous side-step three-pointer to tie the game at 80.

Illinois completed what is still the most improbable comeback in NCAA Tournament history by beating Arizona in overtime to cut down nets in Chicago, clinching their first Final Four since the Lou Henson era. Five-year-old me doesn’t recall too much about this game or many of the details of what happened in the Final Four in St. Louis, but I was hooked on Fighting Illini basketball.

I was fortunate to come from a family of Fighting Illini. In May, when I graduated from the University of Illinois with a journalism degree, I became the 13th member of my family to graduate from the university. I was called the lucky 13th. Both of my grandparents went to Illinois.

Two of their four kids went to Illinois. My uncle met his wife, my aunt, at Illinois. Their two kids and their spouses went to Illinois. My mom met my dad at Illinois and both of their kids went to Illinois. I have an older cousin who attended Illinois and a younger cousin who is a sophomore at Illinois.

Simply put, we are an Illini family. That’s why leaving Illinois is one of the hardest things that I have had to do in my short, 23-year-old, life. For the last four years, two of them with Orange and Blue News, I was able to live out a dream of having a front-row seat to Illinois football and men’s basketball games.

I started covering Illinois sports in 2018 with the Daily Illini. The student newspaper put me on the women’s soccer beat. Quickly, I moved to the women’s volleyball beat and was blessed to cover a Final Four team. In the spring, I moved to the Illinois football beat and in the fall of my sophomore year, I was on the sidelines at Memorial Stadium and State Farm Center for the Daily Illini.

During the height of the pandemic, I was working a summer job in my hometown of O’Fallon, Ill. While at my desk, I got a direct message from Doug Bucshon on Twitter asking if I would be interested in joining the team at Orange and Blue News. A few days later, I was uniting with Doug and his staff to cover the Fighting Illini.

In our time together, we’ve covered things that I never would have anticipated covering. The postponement of a football season, shocking news that Ayo Dosunmu would return to Illinois for a junior season and continue to lead Illinois basketball back to glory – with few fans able to see it live because of COVID-19 – by helping Illinois earn a No. 1 seed in the 2021 NCAA Tournament.

We covered football coach Lovie Smith’s final season in 2020, and the hiring of Bret Bielema. As Illinois fans rushed Lou Henson Court to celebrate the Illini’s first Big Ten basketball championship since the 2004-05 season, Doug and I snapped photos and took videos of players and coaches celebrating their accomplishment. This summer we covered the addition of USC and UCLA to the Big Ten come 2024, one of the biggest moves in college sports history.

I was blessed during my senior year at Illinois to travel across the Midwest. I went to Purdue and Iowa for road football contests. During the basketball season, I went to Kansas City for the Hall of Fame Classic games, I returned home to cover Illinois’ first Braggin’ Rights win since 2017.

I traveled to see stadiums on the campus of Indiana, Purdue, Northwestern, Iowa and Michigan. At the end of the season, I went to Pittsburg for the NCAA Tournament and would cover my last Illinois basketball game as student journalist. The drive back to Champaign was an emotional one as my time on the Illini beat was likely coming to a fast end.

My senior year was kind of like a study abroad program, and I will never forget the memories I have traveling to cover the Fighting Illini and tell the stories of the team that you, the subscribers, love so much.

Telling the tales of Illinois’ players and coaches over the last two years for Orange and Blue News, has been a thrill. I was able to build a relationship with people that five-year-old me would have idolized. Writing about how Chase and Sydney Brown changed their game by going vegan was insightful and inspiring.

Learning how Bret and Jen Bielema have built their family was heartwarming. Listening to Andre Curbelo, Alfonso Plummer and RJ Melendez share details about their friendship reminded me of how the University of Illinois has a unique way of bringing people together. The Clark family shared why they believe in the University of Illinois, and I was reminded of how much I love and appreciate this school.

Illinois will always be home, but working for Orange and Blue News for the last two years made Illinois more than that. Orange and Blue News made me the journalist that I am today, and it gave me the foundation for the journalist I will hopefully be in the distant future.

Covering Illinois taught me plenty of things that I needed to learn. But at the top of that list is the importance of being objective. At times, it was hard. When confetti is falling from the ceiling inside State Farm Center and your fraternity brothers are rushing the court, you want to join with them and celebrate.

But you also understand that you have a job to do, and that job was to serve you. It was to provide you insight on what it was like to be on the field when Illinois beat Northwestern to capture ‘The Hat’ is Bret Bielema’s first season. It was to give you the first-hand experience of seeing the bright, silver trophy handed to Brad Underwood.

Thank you for reading, listening and messaging with me on the boards. I appreciate all your support and I hope to continue to interact with you on different social media platforms in the future. For the last three years, I’ve done my best to never say the three letters most associated with Illinois athletics. But, now, I’m going to. I-L-L!