Ben Rouse poses for a photo with his girlfriend, Victoria Oleson, and Bernie Brewer before sliding down his slide on Wednesday at Miller Park. Credit: Mark Hoffman

By of the

One-hundred-sixty-two games and 100 sausages later, Ben Rouse completed his dream season Wednesday.

From opening day in April to closing night in October, from Miller Park in Milwaukee to AT&T Park in San Francisco, Rouse attended every Milwaukee Brewers regular-season game played in 2012.

He spent more than 680 hours inside ballparks and saw more than 48,000 pitches.

And he traveled. Oh, boy, did he travel, some 42,700 miles by car, by plane, by train and by bus, all in a quest to watch game after game after game in an endless summer of Brewers baseball.

"You only live once, and you might as well do something when you can," said Rouse, a 25-year-old who was diagnosed with leukemia in 2007.

Late Wednesday afternoon, before the finale, Rouse and his girlfriend, Victoria Oleson, who took in a mere 35 games this season, entered the ballpark.

He carried a weathered Brewers' backpack and a camera case and wore khaki shorts and a Brewers' jersey with the No. 162 on his back. She had a big smile on her face as they toured the bowels of the stadium, passing a batting cage and the Brewers' clubhouse.

They were headed around the ballpark and up to Bernie's Dugout, where they took turns traveling down the steeply banked slide.

At the bottom of the slide, Rouse took out a piece of paper with 162 on it and posed for photos.

In a season in which he had seen every game, and even thrown out the opening pitch twice, he had now, truly, done it all.

Rouse, who has brown hair and scruffy ginger beard, got the idea to see a whole season last year. He contacted the Brewers, told him his story, and the team lent him a hand.

Rouse, who had a 20-game ticket plan, was upped to full-season status. The team also got him a ticket for every road game. (Rouse said he spent around $6,500 to make the journey.)

In return, Rouse compiled a daily blog, Ben Rouse's Brewers Mission 162, while also raising awareness for the Be The Match Registry. The registry is part of the Be The Match Foundation that helps find a donors for those in need a bone marrow or umbilical cord blood transplants.

Rouse was diagnosed in 2007 with acute promyelocytic leukemia. He received chemotherapy treatments as well as intravenous arsenic trioxide treatments. He has been in remission since 2009 when he received what he called an "umbilical cord blood stem cell transplant."

Through his years of treatment, he took as many classes as he could at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he graduated in December 2010 with a degree in economics.

His struggle against leukemia gave him a different perspective on life, a yearning to seize every day and every moment.

He had a job as an analyst for a survey research firm in Madison, where he lived. He liked the work but was driven to spend a season following the Brewers.

He gave his employer five weeks' notice so he could finish projects, left the office the Friday before opening day and prepared for the long season ahead.

Rouse never tired of baseball. (He missed only 110 pitches in the first 161 games.) But he revels in the little details of the journey, outlasting a rain delay in Minnesota, scrambling to the ballpark in Milwaukee after a red-eye flight from San Francisco.

His best moment might have been early one morning in St. Louis, after a long game. At 1:58 a.m., his grandfather called him from Wisconsin and told him how proud he was that he was on the quest to see all 162 games.

Ask him why he made this trip, and he responds, "Why not do it at 25? Who knows what my body will be like in 20 years, 30 years."

The season has renewed him.

He knows he has to get a résumé together and get a job. If a future employer wants to know about the gap in the résumé, Rouse said he'll explain it this way.

"That I fulfilled a lifelong dream and did something that only a handful of people can say they have done," he said. "Just the dedication it takes to follow through and actually make it happen speaks volumes of the character, the loyalty that I have toward my team."

After the game, Rouse said he planned to shave his beard and get ready for a 6 a.m. flight Thursday from Mitchell International Airport.

He was bound for Las Vegas to attend his sister's wedding.

She set the date so it would fall after the last game of the regular season.

Read Ben's blog

Ben Rouse's daily blog can be found at www.brewersmission162.mlblogs.com . For information on the need for marrow donors, see www.bethematchfoundation.org/ben.