It's traditional for high school sports teams, on the night of the last home game of the season, to have a senior night to honor all the senior players (and managers) that won't be coming back to play (or manage) next year.

So for the Terryville girls volleyball team that I have now spent four years managing, this was our senior night.

The gymnasium was decked out in streamers and balloons of Terryville High's colors - orange, white, and black. Posters plastered every available space, filled with slogans and inside jokes that only the players on the team would get. There were Christmas lights on one of walls that spelled out, "We (Heart) U Seniors," and the lights on the heart flashed from white to red. It was the nicest I had seen our gym in years.

There were all the traditional trappings of the senior night. The evening's announcer introduced the speaker of the senior night presentation - a junior, who was as close to the girls on the team "as sisters" she would later say. There was the honoring of the visiting team's seniors, even though none of us probably cared much about them. Cared about who their friends were, what they had accomplished. It's just tradition. The same old stuff I had seen four years running now.

I never thought much about senior night. All the clamor, all the emotion that was so tender that you were sure at least some of it was being faked. All those speeches, with their flowery words and over-the-top sentiments. I remember looking on as a freshman and having to choke back fits of laughter at the way everyone was acting. It was almost like watching a play, one where you knew the entire script by heart and knew how it was going to end. I just stared at them back then, surprised that everyone was going through the theatrics of it. Who were they fooling? Who really cared about all this stuff anyway?

Then, something unusual. Something that we didn't normally do: there was a special presentation for a girl who couldn't play her senior year because of an injury, even though she had been on the team since she was a freshman. Everyone was touched by it. Might've been because it was especially sweet. Might've been because no one knew that they had planned it.

The varsity seniors were the stars of the show, of course. They were the ones that won all those games, who worked hard at every practice - they were the real team. Not managers like me, who skipped games when they were inconvenient and slept through practices whenever I had the chance. But they announced the senior managers first. And I was the last of them to be called up. Don't ask me why.

I knew the girl that was giving my farewell speech. She had asked to do it for me shortly after the season started. She was a year younger than me. We were close, and we had become very close over the last couple months.

It was awkward to stand there in the middle of the gym. To just be there, and listen. Everyone watching me. I didn't know how to look, whether I should be sad or happy or pensive or a little bit of everything all at once. I didn't even know where to look, but I think I would've probably looked ridiculous no matter what I had done.

She started her speech. Her voice seemed rattled, even though she had told me beforehand that she had practiced it a lot. She stared at the green piece of paper that she had typed it on. She had told me that she had memorized it, but that she was going to be so nervous that she was going to read from her paper anyway. The sentences were coming at me too fast to even realize what she was saying. I just picked up bits and pieces that got more heartfelt as she went on; how I had started to smile more during this past season; how I had been a friend at times when she didn't have any; how she trusted me with everything, even her life.

I was standing right next to her, but she started talking so quickly and quietly that I could barely understand her.

And then I saw tears coming down her face. Now I couldn't bring myself to laugh, or cry, or do anything really. All I could do was stare at her face, watching those small drops of water slide down her cheeks.

I didn't pick up much of it, but the last few lines were crystal clear: "I know you're going to college in California...but please come back to visit."

A pause. She turned and hugged me. And the applause filled the gymnasium.

"Thank you," was all I could think of to say.

As I sat down to do color commentary on the game for our local tv network, my co-commentator introduced the night's line-up. Then he turned to me and said, "Well, Stefan, you're the big senior on senior night: tell me how it feels."

"Well," I said, "it's not something that you're really expecting. But at the last moment...it kinda gets you, and you get swept up in the emotion."

And it was the truth.