It might have been Villanova in Lexington, Ky., in 1985.

It might have been the Eagles of Buddy Ryan, Randall Cunningham and Jerome Brown.

Or the 1993 Phillies.

Or the night Allen Iverson dropped 48 on the Los Angeles Lakers at the Staples Center in Game 1 of the 2001 NBA Finals.

But it's not any of that.

My best memories of the best of all jobs are smaller, closer to home, closer to the heart.

I'm a high school sports guy. I prefer the local stuff, the small-town stuff, to the big games that fill the big arenas and make the big highlight shows.

I've been lucky. I learned to write on deadline by covering Saturday night doubleheaders at the Palestra in the early 1980s, traveled twice to London with the Eagles for exhibition games, and had a great view when Carl Lewis soared through the Georgia night for another gold medal at the Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta.

I followed the Flyers' run to the 1997 Stanley Cup Finals. I wrote about Scott Rolen's two home runs in the first baseball game after 9/11. I was there the night in Jacksonville when Freddie Mitchell wasn't tapping his wrist, but everybody else was screaming about time.

Through it all, though, I made certain to cover high school sports. I made it a priority to find my way to a football field on fall Friday nights, to sit on a warm wooden bleacher inside a crowded gymnasium on cold winter nights.

Professionally, for me, there has been no better place to be.

Strange as it might sound, I've often suspected that no title means as much to the folks in pursuit of it as a state title.

Odd, I know.

But there's no true hard deadline for professional athletes, no graduation date. When they fall short of a title - and we've seen teams do that in Philadelphia pretty regularly the last, oh, 25 years - they always have next year. And the year after that.

High school careers, like Springsteen's glory days, are gone in the blink of a young girl's eye.

These kids know it, too. One day they are sophomores, and everything is in front of them. The next day, they are seniors, and everything is reflected back.

That impermanence governs everything in high school sports. It's why everything is so urgent, so dramatic, so final.

High school is the last time an athlete gets to represent his hometown and maybe his mom and dad's hometown, too.

I mean, who gets to play for the professional team they rooted for as a kid? Or the college team?

But most high school athletes are part of a chain that stretches back for generations. They are part of a school-color-coded tradition. They are part of a community's sense of life's rhythm: Things change, and things stay the same.

Maybe there's an older brother or sister who went to the same school, who played for the same team. Or maybe there's a little brother who goes to all the games with his little friends, watching with big eyes and bigger dreams.

The games are great, not so much for the quality of play as for the drama and unpredictability. I can't tell you how many times I sat down to write after another crazy high school game, shook my head and said, "Did I just see that?"

So when I think about my best memories of this job, I think about the time the Shawnee boys' basketball team scored the first 31 points of the second half of a state Group 4 semifinal against a Piscataway team with two Division I-bound guards.

Or the time Cherokee was down by 8-2 and scored seven runs with two outs in the bottom of the seventh inning - the last four on a walk-off grand slam - to win a Diamond Classic game.

Or the time Camden's Dajuan Wagner went coast-to-coast in less than three seconds and won a Tournament of Champions game against St. Patrick's with a layup at the buzzer.

That's why I'm still covering these games, still writing about these kids, just in another place, for another newspaper.

That's why I'm still walking up to baseball fields on warm spring afternoons, still watching soccer games under the lights on clear autumn nights.

It's the best part of this job.

But I'm not completely dense. It was pretty cool to see Jordan at lift-off.