By Peter Cleary

Like many of my fellow Seniors, this year I found my annual feelings of dread in early August less crushing than in previous years. I, in fact, found out I had committed one of the most heinous sins an adolescent can commit; I was looking forward to the first day of school. Only somewhat, but somewhat nonetheless.

How could I be blamed? North’s Senior traditions are legendary, and despite an embarrassing scandal last year, they’d survived to see the dawn of Senior Year for the Class of 2012. How we celebrate proves NNHS to be far more than another insignificant, privileged, and most blasphemous, sheltered suburban high school.

Despite sharing characteristics of your typical public suburban high school (less than 50 years old, not centrally located, hastily constructed during an unexpected population boom), North stands out from their counterparts by having a unique culture that goes beyond your normal, dry, half-hearted kind of school spirit.

The desire for a good beginning to a good year constituted cause for questionable festivities on a school night, the least of which included, despite the administration’s relentless campaign against them, sleepovers.

That night, laughable memories of past school days mixed together with countless plans for our last year as many Pandora stations were overworked and the pool table was reset again and again. As the night got better, the concept of sleep began to sound stupider and stupider and so, for many of us, we went without.

Then, of course, came the morning. The tailgating, the costumes, the charge through the halls and the informal, yet energetic rally in the Small Café were all still ahead of us.

By 7:50 a.m. the tailgate had fizzled out and the Senior class was on the athletic stairway waiting eagerly for the main event. But as lost acquaintances made eye contact with each other for the first time in three months, we began to realize how tired the vast majority of us were. After all this it’ll just be another school day, and who’s to say that after this day, it won’t just be another school year.

Regardless, we stormed the halls with the same tenacity as our predecessors; earlier first days of school seeming so long ago as 2013 lived exclusively in the moment, so much so that those predecessors seemed more like ancestors. First the shriek of air horns and whistles bounced off the walls of the hallways, after running out of breath, there was a convergence in the Small Café where a near miracle occurred as the combined roar of nearly 800 individuals didn’t crack a single window.

Walking to my first period class, the deflated feeling I had anticipated on the athletic stairway never hit, not for me, and judging by the faces of the crowd, no one else. As the day continued our energy was replaced by exhaustion, and content replaced joy – the force propelling us through the day.

The stereotypical view of Senior Year became more realistic, off campus lunch, parking, early dismissal/late arrival, the perks kept stress from clinging to me even as that day turned into weeks.

It gradually became clear to me that that early fear was of growing up, going to college, work, responsibility, loss of innocence; this was what awaited us in our upcoming adulthoods. I realized that after the Small Café rally I had had a near epiphany. This was the beginning, not the end.

Fear of losing the benefits of adolescent life had almost made me lose the opportunity to experience them and the many that still lie ahead for one last year, a year crafted for that very purpose.

The horizon still looks bright even beyond graduation; the toughest and most defining choices we make with our lives have plenty of time to be made. As we look toward our futures, more doors remain open than ever will again, paths we wish to take are as clear as they will ever be. While it’s true we must begin to mold and define our future selves, we have plenty of time before we must become them. It’s important to be grateful that we’re at the beginning, because they’ll be plenty of times in the future we look back upon this time nostalgically.