This all started 43 summers ago at Tommy Tuttle's bowling lanes in King, N.C., up above Winston-Salem. Tommy was the local-fave regular on the PBA circuit. I was the greenhorn reporter for the Winston-Salem Journal, fresh out of the local college and making my rounds to collect league reports for the bowling roundup I put together as lovingly as Julia Child might present a recipe for crepes.

They gave me a clattery Underwood typewriter and a desk next to chain-smoking Frank Spencer. I covered high school sports with the wonderful Mary Garber. I saw Pete Maravich put on a dazzling show at the state's all-star game that August. I filled in for the racing writer 3½ weeks later at cramped Bowman-Gray Stadium and watched Junior Johnson nose out Richard Petty for the win.

The money wasn't great.

But you couldn't beat the view.

That's how it began. This is where it ends. This is my final column for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, my retirement swan song. For those of you who've hung in there for nearly three decades at this address, I thank you for your support. For those of you who think it's about time and worry this is a put-on, relax. I'm pulling an Annika here, not a Brett. This is for real. This is a wrap.

Our industry is on a nastier losing streak than Duke football these days, but my hindsight at this moment is 20/20 in favor of good times, good fortune and first-and-10 optimism. Or, as George Welsh put it the 1982 day he was hired to raise U.Va. football from the dead, "If it's a coach's graveyard, it's a pretty nice graveyard."

I was lucky enough to watch Welsh weave magic in Charlottesville (best coaching job in the history of college sports), to witness the 1974 N.C. State-Maryland ACC final and Randolph Childress' supernova outburst at the 1995 tournament, to be at Camden Yards that year when Cal Ripken broke Lou Gehrig's consecutive-games record and in Atlanta when the Braves claimed their lone championship, to hang around the Dream Team in 1992 in Barcelona.

Those are games and events, though -- wins and losses, arenas, stadiums, stat sheets, that sort of stuff. And while they were fun and cool and I got paid to bleed on my keyboard while a clock ticked in the background, it's the people who enriched this gig.

I was blessed to know Arthur Ashe, who died too young but left so much. To spend a day at Grambling in the presence of Eddie Robinson. To share time with Kyle Petty at the extraordinary camp he and his wife birthed for grievously ill and impaired children. To bask in the good cheer of Rayna DuBose, the quadruple-amputee basketball player from Virginia Tech, and in the courage and grace of Kay Yow, the N.C. State basketball coach whose fight against cancer is sweet inspiration.

Big House Gaines once gave me a guided tour of Winston-Salem State and the wisdom of his ways. Mirsada Buric, a runner from war-ravaged Bosnia at the'92 Olympics, and Dieudonne Kwizera, a runner from war-ravaged Burundi four years later in Atlanta, provided eyewitness accounts of heartbreak and hope.

The same held true for James Holcomb, the AD at Prince Edward County High who was gang-tackled by the evils of segregation and forced to seek education elsewhere at age 12 because the schools were shut down -- but who returned to his origins years later to coach and teach and nurture.

"That was a promise I made to God," he told me. "This is my home. This is where my heart is."

Times like that, I felt privileged to do what I do.

Not that it's been an unbroken fast break. I was at Daytona the day Dale Earnhardt died, an epic tragedy. I watched the scuzzy descents of Clyde Austin, Monty Knight and Ralph Sampson. The shenanigans of the Vick brothers. The greed of ACC expansion, a case study in the excesses of big-time college sports.

Still, on balance, I give this run a Kerri Strug -- a 9.712 with (hopefully) a less painful landing.

What I won't miss? I-81 gridlock Saturday mornings above Blacksburg. NASCAR's relentless product placement. Those 9 p.m. ACC tipoffs. Gag-me-with-a-microphone references to "student-athletes" at NCAA pressers.

What I'll miss? Good friends. Pit stops at Jimmy's Barbecue on trips home from Charlotte. Night games at Grant Field. The perverse rush of beating deadline. Press box laughter.

And you guys.

Y'all take care, now, OK?
Contact Bob Lipper at (804) 649-6555 or blipper@timesdispatch.com.