It's 3 a.m. Do you know where your sanity is?

I am sitting in a gymnasium at 3 in the morning, listening to the muted conversations of about 100 high school girls while The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants plays in the background. This is the inaugural event of the school year, the lock-in for the incoming freshmen, hosted by about 20 of the seniors. They play games, have Q&A sessions, and eat a lot of junk food while being locked in the school all night long. Their parents dropped them off at 2 this afternoon, and they'll be picked up at 8 in the morning. I am one of only two chaperones awake at this hour; the other teachers who are staying the night are sleeping in a classroom somewhere. But I learned after the third lock-in I attended that I felt worse in the morning if I got only a little sleep than if I got none at all. So here I am. A few of the girls are sleeping, some of the older girls are working on summer assignments that will be due this week (school starts on Wednesday), some are watching the movie, but most are sitting around chatting with each other. This is a nice bonding time for the freshmen, who are coming to this school from a variety of public and private schools in the area.

Anyway, in my attempts to stay awake, I figured I'd post a blog entry to honor my favorite football player, Junior Seau, who has announced his retirement after sixteen years (thirteen of them with the San Diego Chargers).

I hate it when my sports heroes retire. I cried when I watched the press conference when Ray Bourque (twenty seasons with the Boston Bruins, two with the Colorado Avalanche) announced his retirement after the Avs finally won him the Stanley Cup (but not as hard as I cried when he hoisted the cup over his head); I cried a few days later when Tony Gwynn stepped down after twenty years as a San Diego Padre (it broke my heart that he never won the World Series he so deserved). And it breaks my heart that Seau is retiring without ever winning a Super Bowl, and that he's going out as a Dolphin. The Chargers wanted to open up a roster slot to sign him to a one-day contract, so he could retire with his hometown team, but there was no space available.

I like the players that are class acts. I love the people who are just as good off the field at helping others as they are on the field at hitting them. You can keep your Terrell Owens and your Randy Moss; give me a Reggie White or Cal Ripken. Give me someone who plays the game because he loves it, not because he gets paid for it. Give me Wayne Gretsky, who can own every record in the book and still seem like a humble, down-to-earth guy. Give me Ray Bourque, who only left the Bruins because they told him they could not win a Stanley Cup for him in the years he had left, and he cried when he left. Give me Tony Gwynn, who could have taken his batting titles and his 3000 hits anywhere in the league but only ever wanted to play in the town he loved. Give me Junior Seau, whose foundation has helped thousands of kids, who could inspire his teammates to greatness with a pump of his fist, who had thousands of fans in San Diego screaming his name, who signed a baseball cap for me for my twenty-first birthday. Give me my heroes.

Thank you Junior, for being the class act you've always been.

Number 19, Number 77, Number 55. Thank you for being more than just numbers on jerseys and in record books. You are the reason I love the game.