3:00 A.M.

They say that nothing good ever happens after 2:00 A.M., and I suppose I’m no exception.

Nevertheless, an hour after closing time on March 25th, I sat on a Greyhound Bus about to depart for Atlanta, though it was mercifully scheduled to drop me off a few stops earlier, in Tennessee. Alone and apprehensive, I looked towards a window for some reassurance. There, I saw my likeness, hollowed out by the interior lights behind me, a translucent mask over the spartan station and barren streets outside.

My ghost and I examined each other for a bit, then began to converse in our shared language of expressionless stares and rumination. Something about sitting on a bus like that, surrounded by other late-night isolationists, causes you to reflect on the interlocking events and decisions that led you to that moment, most of them lined with regret.

However, before I could travel too far down any one branch, the bus driver, a loud and bossy man named Wallace, barked some instructions as he clicked the bus back into darkness, and the previously-dormant beast inched out of the parking lot. Once again, I sat solitary in a vehicle full of people.

I was, of course, on the first stages of a 16-hour voyage to Cleveland State’s WNIT third-round game at Middle Tennessee State, which seamlessly reminded me of my last time on an intercity bus, nearly a decade earlier.

Then, I was a member of the traveling party for Penn State’s women’s club hockey team, as something of a whatever-is-needed manager, a role I held for six years.

I did a lot to earn my way on to that bus. Typically, I’d take an evening nap, then wake up at 3:00 A.M. to drive to Central Pennsylvania, in order to catch the team’s departure later that morning. Then, after a pair of games at Rhode Island, or Liberty, or UMass, I’d ride the bus back to PSU, before getting in my car and returning to Northeast Ohio.

The absurdity peaked for games to the west, at Michigan State or Adrian, when the bus would backtrack past everything I had just driven on the way to the mitten. Occasionally, as it rumbled down the Ohio Turnpike, past I-71 (where I’d exit as I approached home a couple days later), I’d pause and think about how objectively irrational it all was. Still, it made perfect sense to me.

When you’re a guy who puts words on the internet and graphics on social media while others play and coach the games, markers of belonging are rare and treasured. I’ve been cast aside as irrelevant or unimportant to the true business of sports many times, often by people whose opinions I valued.

Then there was Carly Szyszko, our team captain. One home game weekend, she emerged from the locker room with an armful of team-issue clothing for me, including a jacket that I still wear often, if only to prove that I was once part of something. Pat Fung, our head coach, became my best friend for a time, as I began crashing at his place instead of the Quality Inn. Eventually, he named our team’s rookie of the year award after me, still one of the great honors of my life.

The bus, though, was unsurpassed. As someone who’s always been in and around sports, I knew those charters as something that athletes remember fondly after graduation or retirement, even more so than the outcome of any specific game. They were the origin point for inside jokes, unique stories, and the shared experience that brings people together as a cohesive singular. If I was a part of the team, I needed to be on the bus.

Back on the Greyhound, I didn’t feel like a part of much of anything. Daylight broke by the time I reached Cincinnati for some stale vending machine Pop Tarts, while resigning myself to the idea that closing my eyes for a couple of hours in an upright position was all the “sleep” I’d get that night.

Somewhere before Louisville, I cast aside a well-meaning attempt to stay offline for a bit, and resumed scrolling. My feeds were dominated by Talia Goodman and what she proclaimed as the busiest day for transfer portal announcements to that point, a status that would be superseded a mere 48 hours later.

I flipped through the various posts, as Robert Morris’ Layke Fields joined the list of outbound Horizon League notables that day, a roster that already included the likes of Karina Bystry, Maddie Moody, Neveah Foster, Jorey Buwalda, and Jada Williams…oh wait, that was the Jada Williams from Iowa State, not the one from Milwaukee.

As my screen flicked off, I again visited my ghost for a moment, with another series of questions. Where do any of us belong? Was my joyful experience on the Penn State bus a mirage? Did I miscalculate my ability to find community in college basketball? Now that athletes have absolute freedom of movement, was solo travel more representative of reality? Are we all just hurtling through the night, tethered to nothing, and merely trying to find some peace?

Then, most damning of all: If schools and programs don’t mean anything to the players, why am I voluntarily being degraded in Nashville’s bus station, after mistakenly getting in the wrong line to re-board my vehicle?

I accepted that my brain was, very likely, a victim of extreme exhaustion, and cast those thoughts, and my phone, aside for a bit.

A week after my bus experience, on the way back to Cleveland from CSU’s season-ending loss at Arkansas State, I once again found myself deep in reflection at 3:00 A.M. This time, I eschewed the bus for what I thought was a more convenient mode of travel, but instead found myself trapped in O’Hare International Airport for what turned out to be 14 hours.

O’Hare, the world’s fourth-busiest airport, is never truly deserted, even in the middle of the night, but it is reduced to a light trickle of bleary-eyed arrivals and custodial carts filing past people trying to sleep on rows of chairs with fixed armrests.

I didn’t quite fit into any of those categories though. I was supposed to be home in time for dinner on Tuesday, but my flight out of Chicago – my third of the day, after an overly-chatty guy joined me on a tiny Cessna from Jonesboro to St. Louis, followed by a middle leg across most of Illinois – was delayed several times, then finally canceled until the next morning. I offered closing my eyes an honest effort for a while, but soon gave up and decided that if walking laps around Terminal 3 would help me retain my sanity for the rest of my unplanned layover, that’s what I’d do.

An hour later, with just about everything but the bathrooms gated shut for the night, my energy waned. I sat down at a gate and greeted my ghost once again, in the giant panes of glass overlooking the taxiways. We had more to discuss.

Back when I was still in the Gateway City, seemingly a lifetime ago by that point, Texas State had announced Chris Kielsmeier as its next women’s basketball coach, and I had nothing but time to turn over that news. While I was happy for the new professional opportunity earned by a man who had become a friend over the last five years, I also wondered what it meant for me. After all, Kielsmeier was my primary lifeline to Cleveland State’s program in ways too numerous to count. What if the new Vikings coach isn’t as accommodating? What if they don’t get me? What if I just don’t feel like sitting in airports or on buses anymore?

Thusly staggered by the return of some of the questions that sprung up on the way to MTSU, along with those new ones, I stood up and searched for a bench away from the windows, one I remembered using back when I still thought I was leaving that night. Instead of a place to sit, I found someone sprawled on it in a groggy half-slumber.

No worries. After all, each of us is headed somewhere else, the only differences are the timing and the destination. Sometimes our departure is measured in hours, sometimes it’s measured in years. There’s a certain brotherhood in that fact, I suppose.

Maybe it goes even further, as sometimes, that seems like the only thing anyone has in common with anyone else.

Szyszko graduated in 2014 – though her Instagram stories after winning a senior league title were a welcome respite from my Greyhound doomscrolling – while Fung left for another job in 2017. Despite my best efforts at hanging on, my own time at Penn State came to an end soon after the latter’s departure. The people changed, and so did I.

Athletes understand that inevitability better than most. Kielsmeier likes to say that the only things guaranteed an athlete are a beginning and an ending. Accordingly, once enough time and space have passed from the beginning, many noticeably begin preparations for the day it all stops.

That doesn’t necessarily manifest itself in the big, obvious ways. In fact, it generally doesn’t. Usually, it’s just a mindset shift that causes those staring down the end to savor things a little bit more than they did as a freshman. They’ll start saying hi to the security guard, or the guy who covers their games more often, or maybe they’ll take a few extra moments to reflect on their journey before a big game. Sometimes, players who never considered a pro career will dive headfirst into that process, hoping to delay their ending for a couple more years.

After it’s over though, no matter how long “over” took, those moments and connections are all that remain.

Perhaps that’s why, a day and a half before I finally left O’Hare, CSU’s team gathered for a postgame meal in the expansive lobby of the Embassy Suites at Arkansas State. Still in their uniforms, the Vikings behaved nothing like a group whose season had just ended across the street 90 minutes earlier, and one that would permanently be torn apart by the next afternoon. Occasionally, laughter pierced the youthfully-loud chatter, while a couple players periodically stepped away from the din to take pictures with traveling friends and family.

Eventually, they all hopped on a bus and departed for the rest of their lives.