For two years, my cousin Ashlee asked me to join the softball team her and her brother Kevin started in Bolingbrook on Monday nights. Finally, after looking for a fresh start I decided to say yes. I began playing with the Outsiders, a team which consisted of family members and family friends, in April 2019. When I joined the team, we had a hard time getting everyone to show up and when we needed a sub, Kevin called Sam, this nice guy he knew from working at the park district. Fast forward to August 2020. COVID was still in full swing, but we had just started the new softball season. By this time, Sam had played for our team more than some of our own roster, and while we would talk sometimes, I wasn't confident enough to approach him. Then my grandma passed away, and my whole family was devastated. Being the super nice guy that Sam is, he reached out to Ashlee, Kevin, and myself to make sure we were doing okay and hanging in there. And as the say the rest was history... ....Until it wasn't. I was jaded and he was enjoying his new found freedom of not being sick all the time after his kidney transplant, and COVID was still a big problem (he would eventually be the one to give ME COVID, not the other way around) and neither one of us really knew what we were doing. But I have always believed that love is like a boomerang, if it is meant to be then it will come back. That's exactly what happened one June day at Bucky's in Itasca when a secret admirer sent an edible arrangement to my job. And this time the rest really was history. We had our first date over the 4th of July weekend in 2021, where we went to see the third Conjuring movie at Yorktown Mall, and then we went to Panda Express (one of our favorites), and he dropped me off at my car with a kiss. We made our relationship official a month later in August. We spent almost a year living 45 minutes apart, taking turns driving each way to see each other multiple times a week. In June of 2022, we got our first apartment together, less than 5 minutes away from the softball fields where we met. We disagreed over when to get a dog after moving in, and I said let's enjoy living together for a while first. Flash forward to July and we adopted our furbaby Daisy, so much for waiting right? And of course, it still amazes me that 3.5 years after we started dating he got down on one knee on March 30th, 2024. I couldn't have ever imagined a more perfectly beautiful proposal. As Gabby Barrett once sang, he's one of the good ones and he's all mine.