After a little over eight months in Connecticut, it’s time for me to go home.

Last August, I left USA Today, where I had been for more than a dozen years, and embarked on a new adventure. I was offered and accepted a job as copy desk chief at NBCSports.com, in Stamford, Conn. The plan was to sell the house and move the family from Virginia.

Ehh, but we never got around to the selling of the house. And then NBC laid off nine of my co-workers. And I got to thinking perhaps this wasn’t the most secure place I could work.

This is the way journalism is these days, and when I left a job of 12 years behind, that was a risk I was running, no doubt. But if I’m going to be in an insecure situation, I might as well be with my family. So I began to pursue other employment, and will start as sports editor for Verizon’s news portal on May 1, back in Northern Virginia.

But it was a risk I had to take, and I think it’s been a success. But it was a good season in New England. I got to see Amherst play four times before the Final Four, including the fall of the last unbeaten team. I saw WPI and Stevens, enough to posit on Hoopsville that Stevens was not to be written off in the first round. I witnessed a great atmosphere for Division III basketball at Keene State and got to a sectional at St. John Fisher I never would have attempted to see otherwise.

A couple of years ago, when Keith McMillan and I were still at USA Today, we ticked off which conferences we had seen and which we hadn’t in Division III football. At any rate, Keith and I started keeping a running tally of football teams, and in basketball this season I got up to 127 men’s programs and 74 women’s programs. Thank you, New England. 🙂

I’d never seen the York (N.Y.) women play, or the NYU men, or Farmingdale women … or the Howard Payne men and women as well as other teams on the Tour de Tejas.

It was certainly fun, don’t get me wrong. I had a lot of time to work on the sites this season, and I think it showed.

Still, it’s hard to think of my time away as anything but a term of nine months in exile. You should see me in the Mid-Atlantic area again this season. And my wife and kids thank Division III for keeping me sane while we were apart and returning me to them safely.