Throughout your childhood, you were granted a few pockets of real-life magic: Made-up recess games so dramatic you were convinced that you may have developed the plot to a breakout big-budget film; long car rides across the state where you could keep yourself entertained; and the seemingly never-ending summer season between every year of high school.
Those were the fantasies you could count on materializing. They were glorious.
The conversations I had with friends the summer leading up to my freshman year at Ohio University seemed like real-life magic, too, or at least like we still had a hold on it. What could we accomplish? Who would we meet?
As excited as we were to find out, that big unknown seemed like it contained some magic-shattering potential. We would all enthusiastically try dining hall food, shake the hands of total strangers and get straight A’s. I would join the college newspaper, become friends with any stranger I met and dress remarkably goth in warmer months. If all else failed, we’d always have summer.
To varying degrees, all of that talk turned into something we could hold onto forever (dining halls are still magical, please swipe me into one). The one thing that changed, though: I stopped wanting summer.
The strangers I met at OU became my best friends, and The Post’s newsroom became my home. The concept of a never-ending summer between school years wasn’t desirable, it was exhausting. I say that as I end my last “true” summer — the one between your junior and senior year of college. I missed my oddball college town.
So it’s good to be back. There’s a lot of magic to be had here. Some of it is in our newsroom, I’m sure, which just made the earth-rotating decision (at least to us) to switch its print format from a daily to a weekly, and to seriously redesign The Post’s website.
The rest of the magic is divided among the muggy classrooms that host your brand-new, sparkling pens — and I assume readers of The Post are just as excited as I am about new pens — and the moment you see your best friends again. Or, if you’re a freshman, it’s the moment you meet those friends for the first time (and don’t worry if it doesn’t come right away, there are literally thousands of people to meet here).
If you were afraid that college meant true adulthood, and thus some of that magic-shattering potential, you’ll be pleased to know that it doesn’t — at least, not always. It’s a fast four-year explosion of something that seems totally, wonderfully invented, and it hardly seems real when it’s happening.
But once you step away, you realize that the grounded earth can’t hold a candle to the magic of a college town.
