Your last practice of senior year will feel like any other practice. That’s why you should pay attention to it.

Lasts rarely announce themselves. The final one of anything you have done hundreds of times arrives looking identical to the hundred before it, same drills, same jokes, same walk to the car, and then it simply does not happen again. Endings get noticed in retrospect, when the schedule stops. By then you have spent the day on autopilot.

Start treating this season’s ordinary days as countable, because they are. At one practice this week, take thirty seconds at the end to look at the field, the people, the light, before you pick up your bag. You are collecting something you will want later.