It was a hallway inside the visitors' locker room at Colorado’s Coors Field that played host to this particularly personal memorable moment, a brief exchange indelible enough to earn permanent inclusion in the stories of my sportswriting career.

In my earliest years as a Record reporter, I covered a lot of baseball, regularly attending games at the old Yankee Stadium and as well as Shea. Those assignments earned me the chance to interview my favorite player growing up, former Yankee closer Dave Righetti. In town as the pitching coach with the San Francisco Giants, I wrote about Righetti during the 2000 regular season and again in the playoffs, when the Mets would advance past those Giants before losing to the Yankees in the Subway Series.

As any member of the sports media can tell you, rarely does a meeting with your former childhood hero live up to its youthful promise, but in Righetti’s case, it did. He was great – engaging, self-deprecating, insightful, and thoroughly invested in sharing stories, of our kids, who were close in age, of George Steinbrenner, his former famous boss, and not simply of his well-known time in New York, but of North Jersey, too, where he had lived for many years, and where I informed him we'd previously crossed paths, when I stood in line at Paramus Park to get his autograph.

I never forgot it, and the following year, when I took over as The Record’s Giants beat writer and found myself in Denver prior to the NFL’s season opener, I joined a group of colleagues at Coors Field for a Saturday afternoon game between the hometown Rockies and the Giants, whose slugger Barry Bonds was in pursuit of the single-season home run record. Bonds hit three home runs that day, so I decided to exchange my ticket stub for my BBWAA card, hitting the postgame interviews to file a story.

On the way out, I passed the coach’s locker room and saw Righetti. Ducking my head in the door, I said hello, with the reminder, “I’m Tara, we met in New York.”

And he said: “You’re not from New York. You’re from New Jersey.”

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New Jersey. North Jersey. The Bergen Record. Springsteen. The malls. The shore. The accent. The diners. The attitude. The passion. The pride.

How do I say goodbye?

My 20 years at The Record, including the last seven as its sports columnist, have come to a close, as I am headed to my next professional stop at The Boston Globe. The attempt to distill what these two decades have meant to me has been an emotional, difficult task, and not because I will be changing my press credentials or driving to different stadiums and arenas, but because I will be saying goodbye to you, the readers. You shared your worlds with me, letting me tell your stories while I told you mine, an ongoing conversation that has been nothing short of a privilege.

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Conversations.

Like the ones I used to share with an oh-so-young Derek Jeter, when he was barely out of his rookie of the year season and we would debate who should win "American Idol." Or the one we had across his final days as a Yankee, when he hilariously (and mortifyingly) answered my ringing cellphone-turned voice recorder during his retirement press conference. Like the one with everyman David Wright in the champagne-soaked hallway of Wrigley Field’s basement, he as happy as he’d been since we were introduced in the 2004 season, when he was first called up to the majors and we talked about his natural takeover from Mike Piazza as the face of the Mets franchise.

Like the one with Amy Mickelson on the grass near Augusta’s famous Butler Cabin, just after her husband Phil won his third Masters title, when she’d arrived at the course for the final holes, fighting her treatment for breast cancer all the while, or the one I never actually had with Phil, that would have told him I was his unwitting lucky charm, and that the first three Masters I ever covered for The Record were his three titles in 2004, 2006 and 2010. Or the one in the Super Bowl Media Day stands back in early 2008, when David Tyree talked about his late mom, how she’d envisioned him playing for a championship, believing it so much she’d set her DVR to record all the way through the Super Bowl only to pass away before seeing it happen, how that conversation happened before Tyree would go on to make the most famous catch in Super Bowl history, believing his mother was guiding him all the way.

Or the one with Jon Bon Jovi on the floor of Continental Arena, the Nets playing the Lakers in the NBA Finals, Bon Jovi answering my questions about how he’d managed to get through a taped version of “America the Beautiful” to be played in all NFL Stadiums when post-9/11 play resumed, how he called it “one of the hardest things” he’d ever done, and how I told him I could sense as much watching it when the Giants played in Kansas City. Or the one with Bob Hurley as he sat, legs dangling, on the stage at St. Anthony High School, when his thick voice and red eyes saying everything about his school’s untimely closing. Or the ones over the phone with paralyzed Eric LeGrand, whose indomitable spirit never dips.

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Moments.

The power of sports is born in those moments, when human connections are made, fueling resonance with readers precisely because of their common experience. Like the time Mariano Rivera laid a hand on my pregnant belly, pausing during the 2004 World Series to wish me early blessings on the eventual birth of the younger of my two children. The time Victor Cruz would lay his hand on then-8-year-old Keira’s head and tell her, ‘You have an awesome mom.’ The time I made a wee hours of the morning phone call to a similarly Yankee-obsessed childhood friend, knowing she would want to hear how I’d just been in the locker room to cover the Yankees’ 1999 title, the realization of a dream I didn’t even know I’d had.

The time Tom Coughlin allowed me to make his journey with skin cancer public, knowing I had survived the same diagnosis. The time I sat next to my former college roommate, Targum editor and fellow sportswriting colleague Kelly Whiteside as our alma mater Rutgers upset then-No. 3 Louisville. The time colleagues Kimberly Jones, Neil Best and Paul Schwartz and I made a post-9/11, 29-hour drive back from Denver together. The times my oldest brother, Jim, and my nephew Jamie allowed me to use their pain of separation due to Jim's military deployment to acknowledge the same heartbreaking journey so many brave families endure, and how the language of sports can build an emotional bridge.

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Memories.

Those moments have become my lasting memories, anchored around the people inside the uniforms. The Giants twice beating the Patriots in the Super Bowl, an Eli Manning-Tom Coughlin pairing that rivals Joe Torre-Derek Jeter as the best coach-player one I saw, the Yankees' modern-era dynasty, the Devils and Rangers making separate runs to the Stanley Cup Final, the Nets playing for a title too. Paul O’Neill winning a title on the day his dad died, Andre Agassi bidding a tearful farewell after his final U.S. Open loss, Serena Williams beating her sister inside those same tennis lines but hugging her so fiercely at that midcourt net. Those beyond the usual headlines too, the local heroes whose recent stories have meant so much to tell. Little Julia de Grandpre or grown up Harrison Eisen, ailing Denny Marcin or inspirational Marilyn Heiner, they let me behind their ropes.

Thank you all for letting them shine.

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One of my earliest bosses used to send me into the field with this advice: Don’t write stories that you could write from your living room couch. You are the readers’ eyes and ears out there, and they trust you to bring them into a world they cannot access.

If I was your eyes and ears, then you were my heart. From the Paramus streets that protected my childhood to the Paramus High School hallways that ushered me toward adulthood, from The Record pages that first printed my name as part of track agate from a high school meet to the ones that featured by head shot as a column byline, ascending to this position has been the greatest honor of my professional life. To every colleague across these 20 years, particularly my most recent sports editors John Balkun and Dave Rivera, my byline may be gone, but my goodbye line endures.

In case you forget. I’m Tara. And I’m not from New York. I’m from New Jersey.

E-mail: sullivan@northjersey.com