TAMPA, Fla. — The first NCAA Tournament I covered was back in 1980, when I was a senior in college at Indiana University. I wrote about all the early rounds, and the Final Four at Market Square Arena in Indianapolis, Ind.

That was cool, being an Indiana native and all, and seeing two Big Ten teams there — Purdue and Iowa — was an added bonus. Watching a champion get crowned — Denny Crum's Louisville Cardinals — in my home state was a lot of fun for a 21-year-old kid just starting his journalism career.

It was historic, too, and that was just the beginning.

But now, it's the end.

Forty-six years later, I'm back for one last NCAA Tournament. This year's Final Four is in Indianapolis again, and it seems like the perfect book-end for me to call it a career. In 18 days, the daily grind of 80 and 90 and 100 hours a week will be over.

We'll crown another champion, this time as Lucas Oil Stadium, and then I'll say goodbye to a fully enjoyable career the next day. It's been a fun ride. 

For my entire life, I've called either Indiana or Florida home, outside of two years in Nashville. My first job out of college was at the St. Petersburg Times and I've spent 28 years in this market as a writer and editor. So it's only fitting that my final "Road to the Final Four'' starts right here in Tampa.

Once the Indiana Hoosiers were out of the postseason field, I didn't have to follow them anymore. I didn't have to follow Purdue either, because I had already retired from that beat and said goodbye in a column last March. I sold my Purdue site over at Sports Illustrated and moved on from them. No need to go back.

So I could have picked any of the eight first weekend sites to cover games. I could have gone to chilly Buffalo or Philadelphia, or flown across the country to Portland, but when I saw the pairings for Tampa,  that was a no-brainer. I live here now, in Safety Harbor, Fla, prepping for retirement. The Clearwater area has been home for most of my adult life and all of my kids and grandkids now live within five miles of me.

So deciding to drive 30 minutes to downtown Tampa was an easy decision. I'm glad to be here.

It's a great place to be for the first weekend. The defending champion Florida Gators are here, and I'm looking forward to finally watching them play.

Alabama, with the best offense in the land, is here too. I get one Big Ten team — the Iowa Hawkeyes — in an old-fashioned BIg Ten/ACC Challenge, taking on the Clemson Tigers. An interesting Texas Tech team is here, too, taking on a sneaky-good Akron team out of the Mid-American Conference.

I've got these four games on Friday — a nice, full 14-hour day — and then the winners will play again on Sunday.

12:40 p.m. ET — No. 5 seed Texas Tech vs. No. 12 seed Akron
3:15 p.m. ET — No. 4 seed Alabama vs. No. 13 seed Hofstra
6:50 p.m. ET — No. 8 seed Clemson vs. No. 9 Iowa
9:25 p.m. ET — No. 1 seed Florida vs. No. 16 Prairie View A&M

It's fun being here at Benchmark International Arena, a beautiful building in the Channelside area of downtown Tampa that is home to the Tampa Bay Lightning of the National Hockey League.

I've celebrated championships here, too, three of them to be exact. The Lightning were Stanley Cup winners in 2004, 2020 and 2021. The NFL's Tampa Bay Buccaneers won the Super Bowl after the 2020 season too, and we jokingly got the nickname of "Champa Bay'' here. 

Those are my hometown teams, too.

The Florida Gators have been a really fun team to watch the past two years, and Todd Golden is a great coach. I'll see them twice this weekend — and won't be a bit surprised if they follow me to Indianapolis. 

It's tough to repeat, of course. But they're the only ones who get a chance.

My first NCAA Tournament included a first that's never been repeated since then, either. It's the one and only time that Indiana and Purdue have met in the NCAA Tournament. To say the least, it was electric.

The Mideast Regional was in Lexington, Ky. that year, and back in those days, there were no restrictions on playing on your home court. So Kentucky was there, and they had a regional semifinal game with Duke. Indiana and Purdue were the other.

Mike Woodson and I were senior classmates in 1980, and Woody had just accomplished something that had never been done before either, and likely never will again. He needed back surgery in mid-December and it looked like his college career was over.

But with six Big Ten games left, he returned to the Indiana lineup. He was spectacular, and Indiana won all six games to come back and win the Big Ten regular season title. He was named Big Ten Player of the Year — playing only six games.

To this day, it's still the most amazing accomplishment I've seen in my college writing career.

Purdue won that NCAA game, and Lee Rose's team led by Joe Barry Carroll, would beat Woodson and freshman Isiah Thomas and go on to the Final Four. They beat Duke, who had upset Kentucky. The Indiana-Kentucky matchup that everyone expected never materialized. 

That was my last college game as a student, too, watching Indiana lose to Purdue.

A month later, Rose left Purdue to become the head coach at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Two months later, I came to Florida for an internship at the St. Petersburg Times, and six weeks into it, they offered me a job.

I said yes, of course, and the rest was history. Lee Rose and I, rest his soul, became very good friends down here in Tampa.

I've had the pleasure of covering the Big Ten and SEC in the digital space for the past dozen years, and it's been great to spend so much time back in Bloomington and the rest of the fun Big Ten cities and towns.

Many of you know that I have a book publishing business, and I've written four books and edited and published 18 others. I had to put all that aside eight years ago when I moved to Bloomington and began writing full time again.

I miss writing books. And what I don't enjoy anymore is working 5 a.m. into the evening six and seven days a week. When I came to Roundtable Sports to help start our new network last August, my focus was more national than local.

Thankfully for me, Indiana's amazing national title run to the College Football Playoff last January became a national story for me, too. I covered the end of the regular season and all of the amazing postseason run through Ohio State, Alabama, Oregon and Miami.

Indiana, the losingest program in college football history, was national champion.

People joked it would be a great movie, but I knew this for sure, based on my history.

I know it will be a great book, too.

So that's what's next for me, because you know I'm just not capable of curling up on the couch all day long. I'm writing a book called "Googled Him; He Won'' and it will be out in late summer. I'm very excited about that next step.

But there's the matter of finishing off this basketball tournament first. Roundtable asked me to stay through the Final Four, and I gladly agreed.

I love and adore college basketball, and I'm glad that the last dozen or so days of my journalism career will be spent in gyms, in Chicago, and here in Florida and back in Indy.

It's just the best way to ride off into the sunset.

And I've only got two words for you as we wrap it all up in the next 18 days: Thank you.