My junior year of college, I decided to stay at the house I rented with my friends on campus for most of winter break. Mind you, I went to Michigan State and grew up in a nearby suburb called Okemos so I was still home for Christmas and everything. The night before the final and most anticipated Countdown Pack dropped, I was on like four different sites at midnight trying to get them. I had pairs in the cart, had entered my credit card info, but all the sites crashed and no confirmation emails.

In the morning, I got up at like 6 AM to drive to the Lansing Mall. While backing out of my own driveway, I got my mom’s old Riveria stuck in a huge mound of snow. I spent like 15 minutes shoveling myself out of the snow, got back in the car, put on “808s and Heartbreak” and made the drive.

Somehow, I missed the exit and found myself getting there even later. By the time I arrived, there was a huge crowd outside of Panera Bread at the mall. Mall security eventually let us in Panera and told us all to wait. After about five minutes of waiting, one guy just said, “F that,” and everybody booked it. Since there were no raffles, signs on doors with sizes or any of that back then, it was a mad dash to pick a random store. I ran by Champs and Foot Locker and decided to hit the furthest spot that I usually had the best luck with, Finish Line. After a dead sprint in my Silver/Black Foamposite Pros, I was about fifth or sixth in line.

Upon getting in line, this dude came up to me and said he was ahead of me. I told him, “No,” because he wasn’t and I knew there was no way he was faster than me. He asked everybody their size in line, he was an 11, as was I, and found a guy in front who was like a 9 or something. He convinced the guy there was no way a 9 was going that fast and gave him cash for his spot. My pair was basically gone, and once the employees got there and the fence went up, we soon found there wasn’t much for the pickings anyway.

All the while, I was on the phone with my buddy Roland in Flint who was trying to get a size 13. We both agreed that if we had each other’s sizes we’d just do a swap. He was able to get me an 11 but I had no luck on a 13. I hit an ATM and drove to his house to pick up the pair and meet his mom. After that, I drove back to East Lansing and my folks picked me up to drive to Indiana for the Swisher side of my family’s Christmas. I kept the shoes with me so I could look at them on the five hour drive and show my cousin Ty– the guy who got me into sneakers– the pack once I got there. We had a great time in Crawfordsville and Ty wanted them bad.

A week later when I was back in East Lansing, my dad gave me a call and said I had a package at the house back in Okemos. To my surprise, one of the orders from Foot Locker had gone through. Since they were a second set of size 11, they couldn’t do much good for Roland but I appreciated him coming through for me. Size 11 happened to be Ty’s size, too. Of no knowledge to him then, I sat on them for three and a half years and surprised him with them as a gift on his wedding day. My mom just wrapped them up and brought them, didn’t tell anybody. He called me the next week when I was walking down South Congress in Austin and told me I was the best cousin ever. Takes one to know one.

I’ve still got my “Playoff” 11s and “Taxi” 12s from the pack which I wear on occasion and sometimes hoop in. While rocking them is still fun, looking back the chase was what it was all about.