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You came, you saw, you wrote. Now it's time to pack it in.

Imagine, if you will, the following scenario. You have just turned 21, and while recovering from side effects of the 21st birthday, you receive a phone call. It is one of the reporters at The Michigan Daily, and he has an announcement. The president of the University has just announced his resignation -- a revelation as unexpected as it is significant. What do you do?

An old maxim of journalism has it that the news never sleeps, so neither do the best reporters. The news doesn't get hung over either, so the aftereffects of a birthday celebration are a sorry excuse not to do your job.

What do you do? You carry yourself into the Daily, where you spend your hangover reflecting on the eight years of the president's term. You do this because ever since your first days at the University, the Daily has been your job.

You started it with timidity, maybe. You saw an ad for free bagels and political debate, and you made your way to the Student Publications Building to see what it was all about. Two women greeted you, both smart, both feminists, both utterly intimidating. Still, you stayed, writing about baseball with a scruffy editor in chief and about cockroaches in school walls with an even scruffier fellow staff member.

Or maybe, as a new student here, you flipped through the pages of the paper while waiting for your first discussion section to begin. Naively, you didn't realize then that discussions don't begin until the second week of class. But the time sitting outside of an empty classroom in the Modern Languages Building was well-spent: The articles in the student newspaper impressed you, and you saw an ad welcoming you to a "Mass Meeting" in the Student Publications Building.

Little did you know that the mass meeting was the first of hundreds of hours you would spend there.

Days and nights you spent at the computers. You came in covered with snow, dripping with rain, seeking refuge from the summer heat. You listened to people discuss, politely and otherwise. You pushed yourself in between your editor and his associate, trying to drown out their screaming with a little of your own. Your name moved up in the staff box, emerging from the masses of "Staff," and you protested in vain at Bosnia obsessions and the misuse of "quintessential."

You worked. You edited. You wrote. You designed. And maybe, between editions, you actually found time to attend class, do your homework and lead some shadow of a social life. If this sounds like a bleak description of life at 420 Maynard, it's only part of the picture. Your marriage of convenience turns into a perfect partnership, just the right "moderate and rational" blend of intelligence and goofiness. You get to learn and lead and laugh. You get to threaten -- sometimes mockingly, sometimes not -- to kill your editor in chief.

Try doing that at a "real" newspaper.

In some ways, however, the Daily is as real as life gets. Students stopping by between classes write about a serial rapist stalking Ann Arbor. Sleep-deprived editors debate affirmative action and marijuana legalization. And you, bleary-eyed but idealistic, are part of it all.

You look back, after three years, after a year in charge. You think of the big issues, trying to count the sheer number of inches you have given to the Code and the Clinton presidency. You take stock of your enemies -- you wonder what Maureen Hartford and Mary Lou Antieau and Deane Baker and NWROC think when they pick up your opinions in the morning. You take stock of your friends, the ones who have sent you letters and e-mail messages and phone calls to support something you've written.

You take stock of your friends, the ones you've made over proofed pages and dinner breaks at the Union. You quietly thank those who have encouraged you to keep doing what you're doing, despite the less-than-promising job market for would-be journalists. Without friends and enemies, producing a newspaper five days a week would be no more than applying ink to newsprint -- lifeless words devoid of meaning.

You adjourn your last meeting, and as the room empties out, your eyes fill it up again with those who peopled it so vibrantly during your time there. You see their faces, hear their voices. You look at the volumes on the wall, where those voices are indelibly preserved.

You take one last look, adding your ghostly presence to the scores that already reside there. And you thank them, and thank yourself. It's been a hell of a ride.