On my first night in Baltimore in 1981, in keeping with my adventurous and highly sophisticated palate, I took my wife out for pizza.
We were at this place in Towson and I was reaching for a slice of pepperoni with my fat little fingers when there was a rustle at the next table.
I glanced over and my eyes nearly popped out of my head. There was the great Johnny Unitas having dinner with his family, helping one of his kids cut his food.
"It's Johnny Unitas!" I whispered to my wife. "No, don't look!"
Naturally, she looked. Then she looked back at me.
"Who's Johnny Unitas?" she said.
I stared at her. We'd only been married three years at that point. But I didn't say: "OK, I don't know if this is going to work out, you and me."
I didn't tell her that Unitas was my boyhood hero, that I wore No. 19 for a time when I was the quarterback for my high school football team, that I still had a Johnny U autograph football in the trunk of my car.
All I did was smile and say: "Think I'm going to like this town."
I ended up loving it. And I loved working for this newspaper, too. But after 32 years as a sports and features columnist for The Evening Sun and The Baltimore Sun, I've decided to move on and look for new challenges.
Oh, no one's pushing me out of here. And I don't know exactly what's next for me, although I'm definitely not retiring from the workforce. You wouldn't either if you had my 401K. But I've got a couple of projects in mind and some time to figure it out, so we'll see where it all leads.
Farewell columns have become a cliché, sure. But if you suddenly disappear from the newspaper and don't write one, people will think you got sick or arrested or something. Then they'll start to tweet: "Where'd the fat guy go?" Better to get ahead of that.
What strikes me most as I write this is how fortunate I was to land here. I got to cover Super Bowls, World Series, Summer Olympics, NCAA basketball championships, U.S. Open tennis and golf.
The paper sent me to the Orioles' first-ever "Dream Week" in Sarasota, Fla., where I spent seven days happily flailing at former O's pitcher Moe Drabowsky's curveballs. An editor once asked if I'd mind playing the top 10 luxury-resort golf courses within a 60-mile drive and writing about them.
"MIND?" I answered. "Uh, no, I guess I could do that."
Look, this is how good I had it: this newspaper even sent me to Beer Camp. Honest. I spent three days in Kentucky swilling 300 of the world's finest beers and trying to make it back to my hotel room every night without stumbling into the walls.
Yes, this was back when newspapers spent gobs of money. Today, the bean counters won't let you go to Arbutus without squawking (just kidding).