It’s hot. It’s crowded. The beer is warm. My orange shirt shows sweat marks on the small of my back. The grass stains aren’t coming out of my white shorts. But it’s the P-rade — those things don’t matter. I love it.

I love that the 20,000 of us Princetonians are happy to see each other when really we’re strangers. I know the members of the Class of 1946 as well as I know the man that made my sandwich at Olive’s today, if not less so. But there’s something about the Orange and Black that makes me cheer and yell and raise my drink as the golf carts roll past because I care about these men. I care that they came first and I care that they come back. In smiling and waving down Elm Street, the men and women in the P-rade tell me that they love Princeton as much as I do and they assure me that many years from now I will feel no different. I will always love Princeton.

Despite moments of overwhelming stress, sleepless nights, rejections, failures or defeats in which I swore I’d had it with this place, I know I will come back many years from now and love Princeton all the same. If the many people walking in the P-rade now came out of these awful and wonderful four years bleeding orange, then I can imagine, and certainly hope, my future will not be so different. The P-rade stands as a sort of living history — a picture of the past that inevitably shows me my future. It is a future in which I wave at people I don’t truly know but know enough because we share this amazing thing called Princeton.

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