About nine months ago, a good friend started getting sappy. Real sappy.

It started on the road trip to Michigan — the last road trip to Michigan we'd ever take as undergrads. That day we took the last steps out of Michigan Stadium we'd ever take as Notre Dame students. And, of course, the post-game meal of hamburgers and Labatt's Blue was the last of its kind.

For the ride home, we tossed our buddy into the station wagon's trunk because in September, we didn't want to think about the last anything. We still had a quarter of our college memories to make. We shouldn't be getting depressed yet. There soon would be plenty of separation anxiety. For now, we'd just enjoy it.

But my good friend's insistence on remembering the last gas fill-up on 80/90 and the last keg of first semester festered in my mind. I decided I'd carry a camera to events and shows and games to record every moment — Who knows when it might be the last?

Today I have a plethora of posed group shots perfect enough to be an ad for Notre Dame prospectives or for Miller Lite, depending on the publication. But looking through the photos, I wonder whether I'll remember college as a Kodak slideshow where everyone wears his favorite mustard-stained ND sweatshirt and leans his head toward the guy to his right. They were great times — formals and parties and tailgates — but they only happened once every so often. Of so many days I have no pictures.

Now, I wish I'd photographed all the small things. Will I remember the ever-wrong clock on O'Shaugnessy shining brightly on a dingy South Bend night? Or recall that if you drive exactly 35 miles per hour south on 31, you'll hit all the lights as they turn green? Will I forget that it costs 50 cents to wash and $1 to dry, and that movies play at Cushing on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights?

I hope I remember all the random things like shopping for fajita ingredients at Martin's with my roommates and running through campus in a green toga with the McGlinn Shamrocks. I hope there's a photo in my mind of our house at 6 a.m. after a party, when the floor is slick with 'Backer sludge and soggy grilled cheeses rot in the sink.

I even want to carry thoughts of the bad stuff, like every Spanish final I've ever taken. And the day of hangover after my 21st. And Lou Holtz's face when he told us leaving was "the right thing to do."

Unrecorded memories of trite moments — hours of class in DeBartolo, frosty drives home for Christmas break, smoothie runs to Reckers —will not make it into scrap books or picture boxes, but they remain part of our experiences at Notre Dame and Saint Mary's. They are late-night moments in which the smiling friends captured at SYRs and birthday dinners shared stories of high school and romance and family and became, well, friends.

So I suppose my friend had it right when he demanded we respect every single moment of our senior year … and of our lives. Because every instant is dear and every last second counts.

Even the one when your friends throw you in the trunk of the station wagon.

• The Last Time