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It was the first time I'd missed a USC home game against Georgia in almost two decades.

Sept. 11, 2010: A hot and sunny day in the Palmetto State.

Despite the warm weather, I was somewhere I didn't want to be, huddled on a couch in Greenville and picking at a bratwurst I'd just half-heartedly grilled on the patio. I was 37 years old, and I was feeling sorry for myself because I wasn't at Williams-Brice Stadium for a Cocks-Dawgs game for the first time since 1988. Some people never grow up, I suppose.

From 1992-2008, I attended every one of our games against the Bulldogs, both home and away. At some point, that particular game had morphed into an outsized symbol for the entire season to me - if we won it, we were in for a solid year, and if we lost, it was time to start hoping for a bid to the Liberty Bowl.

It didn't always play out that way, of course (see: 2014, Season of), but in my mind, I'd slowly come to define the Georgia game as a winner-take-all contest that would decide our fate for the rest of the year. And I wanted to be there.

Instead, I had a couch, an extremely frisky puppy, a bratwurst and a television.

I entered the 2010 season without high expectations for the Gamecocks. The 2009 edition of the team had been the very definition of mediocrity, finishing at a middling 7-6 and closing the year with a humiliating loss to, of all people, Connecticut in the PapaJohns.com Bowl (NOTE: We actually did play UCONN in something called the PapaJohns.com Bowl. That actually happened). The only saving grace in '09 had been an unexpected thrashing of Clemson, plus the off-season signing of a shy, soft-spoken running back from Duncan named Marcus Lattimore.

Now the 2010 season was upon us, and though we'd played fairly well against Southern Miss in the opening game, I'd seen nothing that led me to believe this team was about to do anything special.

I paced throughout the first quarter, expecting doom, as my dog ran a series of breathless circles around the couch. She was as nervous as I was. Eventually I felt calm enough to actually sit down, then take a bite of the brat, then even put my feet up on the coffee table. Slowly but surely, something had begun to dawn on me: The Bulldogs couldn't stop the true freshman Lattimore. Time after time, No. 21 ran directly into the line, took an initial hit and kept bouncing forward until he'd gained 6 or 7 yards.

By the time it was all over, the Gamecocks had beaten Georgia in Columbia for the first time in 10 years, and Lattimore had compiled 182 yards and two touchdowns, and had broken a staggering 42 tackles while doing so. You could hit him, but you couldn't get him on the ground. Who was this kid?

Gamecock fans quickly fell into full-blown Lattimore Fever. A true freshman putting the entire team on his back and willing it to victory? Against Georgia, the same team that broke our hearts with the cruelest of victories, year after year? This happened at schools like Florida or Southern Cal. It didn't happen to South Carolina.

The highlights kept stacking up. Lattimore scored two touchdowns and helped lead the Gamecocks to a win against No. 1 Alabama, which hadn't lost in roughly 17,000 games at that point. He dropped an assassin-like 184 yards on Tennessee as the Gamecocks vanquished yet another opponent that had tormented them for decades. Before we had a chance to process it all, South Carolina was headed to the Swamp in Gainesville with the SEC East title on the line. The winner was going to Atlanta, and the loser was going home.

The Gamecocks had never won in Gainesville since joining the SEC. Losing this game, with the taste of the SEC Championship Game vibrating in our mouths, would be suuuuuuch a South Carolina thing to do. In years past, I would have had a few thousand sick-to-my-stomach conversations with Gamecock fans in the week leading up to that game.

But this time, I noticed something strange was happening. I'd run into a Gamecock fan in the hall at work and we'd talk about the game for a few minutes before I realized we were both quietly confident. We believed. We believed we'd go into a place where we never won and walk away with the SEC East. For the first time in my life, we believed.

We had Marcus Lattimore.

If you watched the game, you'll never forget it: Lattimore bouncing off tacklers time and again, carrying shell-shocked Gators into the end zone with him and never seeming to tire despite an astounding 40 carries. It was a complete, one-man evisceration, as Florida looked on powerlessly while No. 21 played the role of a gladiator, slowly slicing cuts into his opponent's torso until they bled to death. By the time it was all over, he'd compiled 212 yards and three touchdowns, the Gamecocks won emphatically, 36-14, we were SEC East champions, and my girlfriend was literally sobbing (she maintains an almost irrational hatred of the Gators, owing to a time years ago when Florida fans taunted her group of friends during a game).

Even though we lost the SEC Championship Game a few weeks later, there was nothing we wouldn't have believed about Marcus Lattimore heading into 2011. If the media reported that he'd solved world hunger, most of us would have thought, "Of course he did! This is Marcus Lattimore we're talking about! Let's put him in charge of Peace in the Middle East!" That off-season, he could have run for Governor of South Carolina, Dictator of South Carolina, Supreme Holy Emperor of South Carolina: Whatever, he'd have won.

Anything was possible, because we had Marcus Lattimore.

You know what happened next. Lattimore turned in several more transcendent games for USC (he absolutely willed the team to a victory over Navy in 2011), before having two consecutive seasons cut short by gruesome knee injuries. Both times, watching it unfold felt like a slow-moving crash: The knot in the pit of your stomach when you realized he was lying motionless on the field, the shots of his mother on the sidelines with tears streaming down, a flashing image of a grim Spurrier looking almost 1,000-years-old as he surveyed the damage, a medical cart rolling towards midfield, and a feeling that something had ended, that the moment we'd been waiting for all of our lives as sports fans had passed.

In his final appearance in a Gamecock uniform, after a devastating blow to his knee that left him curled into a ball and heaving sobs, the entire rosters of both South Carolina and Tennessee circled him on the field to pay their respects. In that moment, the uniforms and the allegiances and the rivalries slipped away. This was now just about a great kid whose dreams were coming to a close on the cold turf of a football field, a kid who had kept his promise to work harder than anyone else, who inspired belief in his own fans and fear in his opponents.

Unless you've been hibernating in Fiji, you know that Lattimore's lifelong mission to play professional football ended last week, when he retired after two seasons of injury rehab with the San Francisco 49ers without ever playing a down. In the end, the battered knees just wouldn't come back to life for him, despite the hours on the exercise bicycle and the daily grind of running drills alone on the practice field. It was over. There would be no Hollywood ending, no uplifting final act, no quick appearance at the end of a blowout where he'd get to rush for 5 yards and finally know what it felt like to stand on an NFL field as a professional football player.

It was over.

The news flickered through Twitter like wildfire, coming as a sucker punch to a Gamecock fan base reeling from a dispiriting 4-5 season that seemed utterly devoid of the heroics Lattimore made commonplace. In a bad year, this was yet another blow, and it was the worst one of all.

In the wake of the announcement, national columnists from around the country have been weighing in on what Lattimore's retirement "means" in the overall picture: For some, it's an example of the fleeting promise of youth, or an indictment of the NCAA and of the reality that great athletes must defer their dreams to play professionally while toiling without pay for college football factories. Or at the simplest level, it's just more proof of the darkness that has always seemed to hover like a thundercloud over the South Carolina football program.

I suppose all of those ideas have merit, but none of them resonate with me when I consider Marcus Lattimore's legacy. As a South Carolina fan, as someone who sat in the Williams-Brice Stadium bleachers every Saturday and often wondered what I was doing it all for, Marcus Lattimore's legacy to me is fairly simple: He is our winner.

For a program that always seemed to fall short and a fan base that always expected it to, he was the one man in my lifetime that changed the course and altered the future, even above and beyond Steve Spurrier. It was Lattimore who made me start believing anything was possible for South Carolina football, Lattimore who made me realize that winners and champions could actually want to be a part of our team and wear garnet and black.

It was his unyielding insistence to dive back into that line again and again, taking the punishment and still pushing forward - always pushing forward - that made me a believer, that served as an example for a program and propelled an entire roster into believers, too. Though his contributions were too often cut short, it was above all his example - who he is, how he carried himself - that propelled this forlorn program to 42 wins in four seasons.

So many players contributed to those 42 wins: I'll never forget D.J. Swearinger, Connor Shaw, Jadeveon Clowney, Kelcy Quarles, Vic Hampton, Alshon Jeffery and every other guy who strapped on a Gamecock helmet and stepped on the field these last four seasons.

But Lattimore was the heart, the soul, the courage and the spirit that set that 42-win renaissance in motion. He forever dismantled a mindset that had infected an entire athletic department, and just as he kept hitting those holes again and again, his aura of belief and quiet confidence eventually permeated the program completely. Without Lattimore in 2010, perhaps there would never have been everything that followed: Clowney's "Hit" against Michigan, Swearinger's ownership of Clemson's collective mind, Shaw's comebacks and courage, Alshon's ongoing brilliance.

I can honestly say that I don't where we'd be without him.

Now he's coming back home, to the University of South Carolina, to finish up his degree and plot his next course in life. He'll be just another student now, just another kid toting a backpack around the Horseshoe, another kid eating crappy food in the dining hall and cramming for finals.

But to us, he'll always be so much than that.

To us, he'll always be the embodiment of a dream that we always had, a dream that would never die even when we were going winless or getting humiliated by 46 points to our archrival, a dream that someday we could compete and win in the SEC, that we'd stand shoulder-to-shoulder with anybody in the country on a football field and show the rest of the world how much pride we have in the school we love so much.

"You can't win at South Carolina," the coaches from other schools whispered to Lattimore during his recruitment. "Come play for a winner."

Lattimore didn't believe them. His secret was that he already knew he was a winner all along. He didn't need to wear an Alabama jersey to become one. So if he was more comfortable at South Carolina than anywhere else, why wouldn't he just win there, too?

He did win.

Marcus would never say it, but from the minute he stepped on our campus, everyone who watched him and saw how he worked knew the truth: That guy's a winner. And pretty soon, his teammates were, too.

Coincidence? I don't think so.

Thanks for the memories, No. 21. And welcome home.