Realizing that it's actually starting again. The finished product seeming so far off. Watching the sun come up over the mountain at early, early, early morning practices. Getting used to strange bruises showing up. Getting used to the pain. Learning not to complain, learning to understand. Learning what it feels like to actually pay attention. Those horrible, hot days of summer band camp. The smell of sunscreen. Rehearsing drill until your legs and ankles and toes burn. Doing the sets until the words "one more time" lose meaning. Stan. Grabbing fourteen pieces of equipment and setting them out on the field with the timing of a military offensive, day after day after day. Ice to relieve bruises on wrists, foreheads, ankles, arms, backs, cheeks, fingers, feet, knees, shins. Starting a day of band camp at six o' clock and going and going and going for hours with no breaks. No breaks. Working during football games instead of watching football games. Swollen feet from standing for days on end. Doing push-ups. Standing at attention for five more minutes than you can bear. Sunburn. Pushups. Wanting to sell your soul for five more minutes of sleep. Pushups. Flags in the face, rifles in the ribs, sabres...all over. Wanting to give it all up and join the chess club. Hearing the show music in your sleep. Playing the show music in your car for fun. Wanting to give up your everything for the day's practice to be over, and the next morning being so excited to get to practice you can hardly stand it. Stan. Heartburn, Heartbreak. Dancing to everything you hear. Tossing and spinning anything you pick up. Inside jokes. Being made fun…but knowing it doesn't matter...because you're having fun. Running laps because someone else was late, again. Dropping for pushups because someone blinked at attention, again. Doing more push-ups. Wondering what happened to your life. Going from school to home for an hour of homework, back to school for hours of practice, back home and being so tired you can't even think about homework, and starting over again the next morning. Lost shoes and lots of glitter. Duct tape. Stickers. Blisters on your palms. Long underwear under your uniform and icy wind in your face. Being so cold you can barely breathe, but yet being able to prance out on the field and perform like you're a star. Learning the fine art of sleeping on a bus. Tears. Learning you have 200 new brothers and sisters who stick by you through thick and thin. Learning that what others don't respect, they know nothing about. Band boys. Glitter. Realizing that what everyone else thinks doesn't matter because you have the best band imaginable. Knowing you have 350 new parents who will cheer for you, no matter what. Knowing that you have a huge, irreplaceable family who is there for you and with you through everything. Laughing with others and learning more about yourself than you ever thought possible. Realizing that the people you thought hated you before are the coolest friends in the world. Being brought out of your shell and into a world of everything awesome. Doing more push-ups. Lots more glitter and show makeup and hairspray. The smell of the air on contest morning. The intensity of the air. Thinking the show will never work. Quiet time on the bus. Sharing makeup and bobby pins. Balancing those little mirrors on those bumpy busses. Looking around you and realizing that these people make everything worth it. Running though the show over and over and over and over and over. Drilling the counts into your head. Believing it will never be good enough. Thinking it is good enough, and being proven wrong. And then finally, it comes together and you have achieved perfection. Spinning your hands off, performing you brains out, dancing to the heavens above, and being so into the show that you have tingles running through your spine from opening set at a competition all the way through the bus ride home afterward. A slice of time in a stadium when everyone cheers and your mom cries and pictures get taken and for once, just once, you have the world in your hands. And the band marches out of the stadium and to the buses, always together whether it's success or not, and you know by the feeling in your heart that it doesn't get any better than this. And you know that if someone asked you to turn around and "do it just one more time, a little better," you would.

No one said it would be easy, they just said it would be worth it.