Writing a farewell column is hard.

I mean, seriously. I still don't fully believe I'm about to graduate in May, and I'm supposed to wrap up three and a half years of covering Marquette sports with a meaningful twist? It doesn't seem possible.

I haven't been writing columns long, but I've thought for weeks about what I would say during my last stint on the soapbox. Then I got lucky.

See almost two weeks ago, Marquette student Ian Parker bowled the first-ever 300 game at the Union Sports Annex during his Wednesday-night bowling league. That's a perfect game. Twelve consecutive strikes. Impressive.

Parker's performance got me thinking. For the majority of Marquette's student-athletes (and Division I athletes in general) graduation is celebrated as the "end" of their athletic careers. But isn't the beauty of sport the fact that its influence never really leaves us?

Think about Parker. Aside from his ability to throw a bowling ball, there isn't anything particularly "athletic" about his appearance (and let's grant, for the sake of this column, that bowling is a sport). He's not a 6-foot-5, 250-pound beast; he's about 5-foot-9 or so and rail thin.

But no bowler will ever bowl a higher score than the one Parker turned in, and lest you think this was a fluke, it was his third perfect game.

("I was the most drunk for this one," Parker said. O.K. so it's a different kind of athleticism, but you get the point.)

Parker, a 24-year old fifth-year senior, has been bowling in leagues since he was six-years old. His first 300 game came when he was 16-years old, and he said he's still the youngest person in the state of Vermont to bowl a perfect game.

Parker will graduate in May with no illusions of being a sunglasses-wearing, crotch-Xing Pete Weber clone. But that doesn't mean he has to stop bowling.

The same goes for the rest of us graduating seniors. Even if you don't have an athletic bone in your body, sport will always be there for you.

Sport is a release from everyday life, entertainment in the most hands-on sense of the word. We place so much emphasis on these games because they allow us to escape and sometimes shape who we are. You can play fantasy football, but the world of sport is made completely of fantasy – for now a place where the word "bailout" only refers to a safe shot on a golf course.

Sport gives us memories, and ties us together. Seniors, remember the way you felt when Steve Novak hit a 21-foot jumper to beat Notre Dame 67-65 in January 2006? I thought so.

Four years later, remember how you felt when the final seconds ticked during Marquette's NCAA Tournament loss to Missouri? An unreasonable attachment, maybe, but a powerful unifying force, nonetheless.

For me, graduation means the end of press row seating at Marquette games. It means the end of listening to men's basketball coach Buzz Williams listing off ridiculous percentages and thinking, "Did he just say that?"

It means no more excuses to see future Marquette greats like golfer Mike Van Sickle up close and in their natural habitat. And it means the end of my girlfriend asking me to mention her dog, Josie, in a column (fetch is a sport, after all).

Like a great many graduating seniors I'm not exactly sure what's next.

But wherever I go, sport will be there too. And that's enough for me.