Let me tell you a little story about what happened on this day a quarter of a century ago. It starts and ends with kissing a girl.

It was a Saturday. Feb. 7, 1998. And it turned out to be the most defining day of my life.

This was my first year working fulltime in college athletics. I’d joined the previous summer as an assistant in the sports information department at East Carolina University. Greenville was a pretty good sports town. Great people. I helped with most sports, especially football and men’s basketball, but the main job I was hired for was baseball. That was a huge task, especially for a novice like me. Baseball had a little history at ECU and I had no history with the sport. Yes, I’ve loved my Chicago Cubs since before my first game at Wrigley Field in 1983, but that’s just being a fan. I didn’t ‘know’ baseball. And here I was set to start my first season as a Division I baseball SID.

I would be the official scorer at home games at Harrington Field, and be the one on the road fighting for a fair decision in our half of the box score. There was a new coach too. Keith LeClair started at ECU just a couple months before me and brought with him a reputation of being a winner. I hoped we’d win so I would have some good things to publicize to local and national media. Only time would tell.

(Spoiler alert: Keith was an amazing coach and I was in for the ride of my life. After a mediocre first season, he built a top-15 team the following two years, giving me plenty of players and moments to publicize — some of which were perhaps the pinnacle of my career — before I moved on to Nebraska.)

As the start of that first season approached, my insides got all kinds of tied in knots. I didn’t know if I’d be able to do the job well enough. Crazy worried that I’d screw up an important call was an understatement. It wasn’t life-and-death brain surgery but it sure felt like it to me at the time. When you’re young and naive, you don’t know any better and the big things seem bigger. This was gargantuan.

The pressure turned up as practice started in January. Day by day, tighter and tighter I got until finally, it was Feb. 6. Tomorrow was the opener and luckily for me, it was on the road. I wanted the pressure to be off a little and that helped. We were set to play at Duke. It was a just bus trip and with a 1 p.m. first pitch, we’d leave about 9 a.m. This was early, early internet era so we didn’t have all the weather apps at our fingertips like we do today, but we did have a phone and the nightly news. The weatherman was unkind. He was calling for rain most of Saturday in the Durham area. That morning, our coaches called their coaches and we waited. And waited. And then waited again. Tried to wait out all the weather before finally my first official in-season press release went out:

Game postponed. Will play Monday.

And never have I ever been so appreciative for Mother Nature in my life.

You see, there was this pretty little girl in our office. She’d joined us in the fall and worked football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, volleyball, pretty much everything. Stone-cold killer when it came to sports trivia. I liked that about her. I loved her eyes more, although she couldn’t know that yet. She was a sophomore, just 19 when we met. I was, um, older. I never stood a chance, which I should have known right away.

To this day, I remember the first time I laid eyes on her. She was wearing this white open-collar blouse with three-quarter length sleeves. Khaki pants with tennis shoes. Lipstick and a necklace. She sat in my office chair and I loved the way the light from the window danced off her soft skin. Something was different about her. To this day I also thank Stormin’ Norman, my boss at the time, who made me do the interview when he knew I could not give a shit less about who we hired. When she left, I went straight into his office and said she’s the first one we need to put on the stat crew and she should start the next day.

Lucky for me, he listened.

The next few months, we all got to know each other. As a staff, each fall was a bit of a do-over. New full-timers. New students. There were plenty of people learning how others around them worked. In-game I normally was pretty uptight, faking my way through leading the live stats crew. In the office, I was more laid back. Occassionally we’d go out in a group and I was relaxed. Then again, beer and wings will do that to a guy.

Fast-forward 5-plus months. Season-opening baseball game postponed and with both basketball teams on the road, I had no games to work that day. It was a gloriously unexpected weekend of relaxing with baseball pushed to Monday. So I called her. Do you want hang out, I said. Sure, come over and watch the game, she said. Naturally, I went over to her apartment an hour later after anxiously waiting 55 minutes thinking how I did not have a clue of what to say when I got there. When I showed up, she had the game on, as expected. No attention on my part was actually given to that game. And no clue still as to who was playing, although knowing her, a good guess would be that it included Bob Rathbun calling the Raycom/Jefferson Pilot ACC Game of the Week.

Turns out, the only game I saw was my mind tricking me into thinking I didn’t stand a chance.

We’d flirted over the previous couple months but I never thought it’d lead anywhere. She didn’t want anything to do with me, I expected. I was too old, or too whatever. So when that little tickle fight turned into a kiss — don’t they always? ALWAYS — well, I was as stunned then as I am now. That one kiss though, sitting on her living room floor, it led to a lifetime of memories. The kind that you don’t trade for anything and that you fight knock-down dirty to keep flowing until the end.

Maybe I don’t remember things as well as I used to. The memories, they’re not as sharp sometimes, a bit fuzzy on the edges if I can even remember at all. Not because I’m so old and decrepit, but with time, we add more of them, more experiences. The newer ones crowd out many of the older ones. But this one kiss, 25 years ago today, this one memory is crystal clear. And I think it always will be no matter how many years go by.