So with this being my last column ever, and all I planned to get all sappy on you and tell you how fast these four year went. I’d drop in some funny anecdotes and finish with a few words of “wisdom” that you wouldn’t listen to.

And then Derrick Rose blew out his knee.

Memories of Chris Otule clutching his knee at Madison Square Garden hauntingly came flooding back in.

At 5:45 p.m. on Saturday “ACL,” “Derrick Rose” and “I cried when” were all trending worldwide on Twitter. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how most Chicagoans were arranging the three trending topics in their tweets.

You watch sports for years on end in that vain hope that you may one day get the good fortune to see your team challenge for a championship. In Derrick Rose, Bulls fans had hit the lottery 1,000 times over.

Here was a humble Chicagoan who also happened to be one of the best basketball players in the world. He was the one that would take the Bulls to levels not seen since No. 23 broke Utah’s heart one last time. And in a simple drive to the basket — boom goes the dynamite.

BullsBlogger on Twitter summarized it best: “Title-contending seasons are rare, and who knows how many of those we’ve lost today. That’s the big-picture kick in the sack.”

It’s not just this season that has been lost — no sane human being can legitimately expect the Bulls to beat the Heat, let alone win the whole thing — but Rose will now miss the Olympics this summer and who knows how much explosiveness will return whenever it is he does get healthy.

You know it’s serious when Twitter unites in eulogizing a player. Kevin Love, Bill Simmons, Jeff Goodman, Darren Rovell and even noted LeBron-lover Mark Strotman tweeted how sad it was to see him go down like that.

I was crushed, heartbroken, incredulous and just downright miserable from that point on. How could this happen? Why was he in? Is it the shoes?

Beyond the personal grief, there was one even scarier outcome as a result of Saturday’s events: the power of false information on Twitter.

From the time the game ended it was all speculation as to what the extent of the injury would be. For the first few hours no one really knew anything, which didn’t stop people from pretending they did.

A fake ESPNChicago retweet claimed that Rose had torn his MCL and ACL, would miss the remainder of the playoffs and would have surgery on Tuesday. The real ESPNChicago account immediately rebuffed these assertions saying they still did not have any information.

However, an employee at the NBC affiliate in Miami did not get the memo — as Stacey King likes to say — about the fake tweet and ran with the information. A few minutes later the Twitter account under BreakingNews repeated NBCMiami’s claims, broadcasting the false information to its nearly 3.9 million followers.

From there all hell broke loose as tweets and retweets flowed endlessly. In a matter of minutes the whole world had been duped by one fake tweet and one reckless intern — most likely the one running NBC Miami’s Twitter feed.

It was the absolute most incriminating indictment of today’s journalism mentality. Sure there is a need to get information quickly, but in today’s scoop-getting society, speed trumps truth way too often.

Dr. Stephen Byers taught me in one of my first journalism classes at Marquette to believe none of what we were told without verifying it. Your mommy says she loves you, eh? Prove it.

That’s what you learn in journalism school. The truth is the ultimate goal.

Not anymore.

I’m scared of the implications of this first-past-the-post mentality. In the sporting world the consequences are frustrating, but in the end irrelevant. In the military realm, where a twitch of an index finger can mean the destruction of entire cities, it’s downright frightening.

You would hope that government officials would be smart enough not to fall for false tweets. Then again, there are sitting congressmen who have linked to articles from the Onion in support of their policy decisions.

So this is it. Rose has wilted and my profession flopped. I guess it can’t always be seashells and balloons.