Gators, for the past 18 months you have been reading about the bad breaks UT got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth. I have been posting on the VS for 13 years (1st 7 under another name, last 2 months with a Gator icon) and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.

Look at these Gator poasters. Which of you wouldn't consider it the highlight of his mid-morning heroin break just to chat with them for even 10 minutes? Sure, I'm lucky. Who wouldn't consider it an honor to have enjoyed the brutal-truth pronouncements of Hung or CrocodileJimV? The youthful candor of Chigatorbri? Also, the builder of the internet rumor mill's greatest empire, Mudlizard? To have spent years with that wonderful, floppy-eared ball of energy, Gator Jamie? Then to have spent more with that outstanding leader, that smart student of education, the best poaster on the internet today, Baby Sis? Forget not the cheeky Plainsman, our affable Aubie. And to be comforted by the reassuring but often unheard garbling of the swamp as it releases its gas in the coolness of night. And similarly reassuring gaseous fumes released from the direction of Kentucky. Sure, I'm lucky.

When the Tennessee Vols, a team that would give its right arm to beat the Gators, sends you a gift - by firing its toothless South Carolina hillbilly AD - that's something. When everybody down to the board moderators, trolls, Lounge politicos and stoic men in white lab coats remember you with poast stars  - that's something. When you have a beautiful Vietnamese escort who takes sides with you in squabbles with his own jealous white sugar daddy - that's something. When you have a father and a father and a mother who work all their lives so you can have an education from Knox county's flagship university - it's a blessing. When you have Mudlizard/Facebook friends who have been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed - that's the finest I know.

So I close in saying that UT may have had a bad break, but with that astonishingly inept fraud Mike F*CKING Hamilton now departed, I have an awful lot to live for.*

*Any resemblance to Lou Gehrig's farewell speech is purely coincintentional.