When you go away to college, you still return for a high school football game or two, but as the years pass your attachments at your high school dwindle and you realize as a senior that no one you attended high school with is still there. They are all in college too.

But while many would sooner forget those teenage days, some still linger in their high school glory days.

They still wear their conference championship rings and follow the statistics of their alma mater.

Many have even continued those glory days as collegiate athletes while the rest participate in intramurals, adapt the college life into `beer baseball’ and tailgate before the football games – none of which are done in high school.

Now as a senior, I still receive the e-mails from my former coach about a team I don’t even know. Yet I’m interested to know that the Hoffman Estates girls’ cross country team finished third in conference this weekend. And I’m proud of them.

But I’m not alone in this bond.

Many students from the infamous Providence High School still hold their football team to the high standards it had when they were teenagers. You just can’t overlook Sunday’s Chicago Tribune prep sports section with Providence bannered across the top for their latest victory on the football field.

Whether you played sports in high school, cheered on your friends, or simply supported as a fan, college students around the Midwest still follow these same schools today.

While you may say that high school was the best days of your life, others now will argue that it is college. College also holds strong ties, but we may not realize them until we graduate, as we do now with high school.

Years from now we will look back on the Panthers and remember sitting in Lantz Arena, O’Brien Stadium or other athletic venues and remember the good old days.

Maybe in ten years we’ll be traveling back to Charleston for the Homecoming game or buying a plane ticket to watch the Panthers at the NCAA tournament. But until then, I’ll be sitting in the stands at Eastern and reading high school e-mails about teams I will never know.