A Van

It was the highway to hell.

At the very least, on March 24, that’s what the drive back to Ann Arbor from Kansas City felt like.

I shouldn’t complain. After all, the drive is what I had signed up for that November. I knew the trip was a possibility, but that didn’t make it any less grueling.

To be clear, the opportunity to cover the NCAA Tournament was a dream come true.

It’s one of the biggest stages in sports, and thus one of the biggest stages on which I could produce my work. And damn, did I produce some good work in March.

But at some point on the never-ending expanse that is I-94 East, I realized — in the very literal sense — for the first time in my life, that I was exhausted.

I knew the cold was coming on in the same instance that I knew Michigan’s season was over, and Oregon was headed to the Elite Eight.

As soon as the game ended, I could feel the congestion building up.

I took the elevator down to the event level, and my nose ran like a faucet.

As I walked to the locker room, I could feel my body begging for a good night’s rest in my real bed back home — what would be the first in roughly a month.

And as I sat down in the media workroom, I felt the pain sting in my head, the sign of a migraine I was about to carry with me into a car prior to embarking on a 724-mile drive back to Ann Arbor.

When that buzzer sounded, it was as if my body knew my work was done, finally rebelling against the 3,815 miles I had traveled, often overnight, in the span of 24 days.

I sat in that rented silver Dodge Caravan, confined to the back right seat of the third-row, feeling trapped.

I stared at cornfield after cornfield while desperately trying to adjust my pillow between the window and a cup holder to attain some semblance of comfort that would allow me to sleep.

I wondered how a minivan that wasn’t emitting any heat from the vents could make my t-shirt stick to my back with sweat.

And for some reason, every inch of my body was itching relentlessly. If I could just get a quick shower and have 30 minutes in my bed, maybe it would stop; maybe I would stop feeling so anxious.

In that moment, I thought of their plane.

That plane — the one the basketball team got to take back to Ann Arbor — must have been beautiful. The seats probably reclined into a quasi bed. The legroom had to be a sight to behold. It must have been fast, real fast, a lot faster than a minivan.

I had picked up a speeding ticket during my driving shift, irrationally trying to cut time off our trip mile by mile. That plane didn’t have any rules of the road to abide to, no police officers to pull it over. It took off, cruised at altitude and descended into Willow Run Airport all in the span of roughly two hours. I, on the other hand, had over half of a 12-hour drive left to sit through.

Damn, I wished I were on that plane.

Once I was done torturing myself, I snapped back to reality only to see more cornfields and find I still couldn’t adjust my pillow into the right position.

I realized I wasn’t going to sleep in the car, and after considering the four papers I had due in the next four days, realized I wasn’t going to sleep much when I got home either.

For the first time in my life, I was exhausted.

And with the exhaustion came the question — with more self-pity than I care to admit — why was I doing this to myself?

We pulled into Ann Arbor at 11 a.m. the next day.

I went to bed.