Steamboat Pilot & Today

As graduation day fast approaches, and I realize that these are the final days I will be walking through the doors of SSHS as a student, I find myself fondly reminiscing with my fellow classmates about the past four years we have spent in the soap opera world we call Steamboat Springs High School.

It always begins with, "Oh my God, do you remember when," and we launch off into hysterical recounts of homecoming our freshman year when our float was sabotaged, (to this day, although they never admitted it, we know it was the senior class), or homecoming this year, when our float blew apart on the way to the school, so we had to pile the entire senior class on a flat bed and make the most of it. Then there are the outdoor parties and camping trips, days and nights that we will remember as "the good ol' days" in the future.

There are also the bittersweet memories, like the last football game, when the boys lost in Conifer, and we realized that our last football season was over.

But we always end up laughing about how our class can never pull it together, how we always have such big dreams, but never seem to be able to make it work at the end. Every homecoming and prom since our freshman year has started out perfect, turned out a disaster, and ended up being a blast. The Class of 2001 has pulled some stunts and left a legacy that no one, faculty or students, will ever forget, (and it's not over yet).

Through countless retellings, every memorable event has become exaggerated and distorted, but the inevitable truth still remains through every prom, sports event, make-up and break-up, the Class of 2001 has done it all as a group; we have been through high school together, we have watched each other grow up.

That is why these final days are so exciting, yet so sad. We are finally realizing that no matter how much we say we hate knowing everything about everybody, next year when we don't know anything about anybody, we are going to miss it.

As much as it will be a relief not to have somebody running up to me every Monday morning screaming, "DID YOU HEAR WHAT SO-AND-SO DID THIS WEEKEND?" it's also sad to know that no one at college is going to know me as well as the people I went to high school with.

It is a bittersweet feeling to know that we have screamed through our last high school football, volleyball and basketball games, that we have danced and yelled through our last homecoming and prom.

Although some of us were never friends, and some of us are enemies, the fact still remains that we are a class, and we are a talented, smart and athletic class, that no one will forget.

There is no doubt that no matter how many times we have said through the years that we cannot wait to get away from everyone with whom we grew up, the members of the Class of 2001 will miss each other.