Today is Jeremy Heath's last day as sports editor at the Dispatch Record. This has, without a doubt, been the most important year of my life.

When I push the sports editor's chair under its desk for the final time today, say my final good-byes to my friends on staff and head over to Copperas Cove to pick up the moving van, I'll do it as - please, God, forgive me for my pride - one of the best husbands and fathers you're ever going to know.

That's because I get it.

I get that prestige and money mean exactly jacksquat. (Those things are nice, but they should be treated like cherries on top of a sundae - if they're there, great, but the treat should have been the sundae.)

I get that I can be as careful as possible in everything I do, but I don't get to decide when my time here is done. That means I have to treat every single moment with my miracle of a son, Landry, and my beautiful, strong, intelligent wife, Jennifer, as if they are my last, because they very well might be.

I get that it doesn't matter how much I enjoy my job here. That it's just a job. That moving my little family closer to my parents and my in-laws is going to make all of our lives better, and that it would be selfish of me to keep my family here, no matter how comfortable and happy I am working for Jim and Gail Lowe.

See, I really do get it.

And a huge reason why I get it: The time I got to spend with the people of Lampasas, Texas, U.S.A.

I'm not writing that as one final kiss-up to the town so I'm remembered by the readers of the Dispatch Record in a positive light. If you paid any attention to the preceding paragraphs, you already understand I couldn't care less about what anyone outside of my home thinks of me.

So how, you might ask, did my one year at this desk help me figure out what's most important on this planet?

Well, the truth is, I didn't realize it until I sat down to write this. I knew I'd had a pleasant experience here, and that I was going to miss my job and the people here. What I didn't realize until I sat down and started making a list was just how many friends I made in the course of a single year. If I were to just go through and list everyone here in Lampasas who had a positive affect on my life, or who helped me attain information for these pages or who just stopped me at a game or shot me an e-mail to remind me that what I do makes a difference in people's lives, I could fill this entire space with names. Considering that would be about as exciting a read as the phone book, I won't do that.

Per usual, I've digressed, so let me get back to the point. It was in realizing that literally hundreds of people have touched my life in the past year that I gained a perspective that will help me be a tremendous father and husband.

You see, I spent the first 31 years of my life in Amarillo, and because my time there was continuous, it's hard to separate any one unit of time and say, all of these things happened to me then or I met all of these people during this time frame. It all runs together.

The last year is a different story. It's easy to sit down and separate all the experiences I gained here. It's easy to identify all the incredible people I met here, all the people who taught me something or helped me with something. And that, mercifully, gets me to my point: If I can gain what feels like a life's worth of experiences in one single year, then every year from here on out can be just as important and educational as this one. Every year, month, day, minute... heck, every single second should be cherished. They're all important, and they should all be treated as though they're important.

If the people here hadn't been so welcoming and supportive, I probably wouldn't have figured that out. I wouldn't get it. But you were and I do.

Thank you.