A few weeks ago, I took a trip up to Boston to see the Mets play the Red Sox at Fenway Park. Fenway has always been my favorite ballpark. It’s not the biggest, not the most modern, but there’s something about the way it feels—like baseball is supposed to feel. The creaking of the wooden seats, the hand-operated scoreboard, the Green Monster looming like a battered monument to every game that’s come before. As much as I bleed Mets blue and orange, there’s a piece of my heart that will always belong to Fenway.
This time, though, the trip wasn’t just about baseball. It was about going back—back to a city that shaped a crucial chapter in my life. Back to my days at Boston University School of Law, where I earned my LL.M. in Taxation. A degree that mattered. A degree that stuck. A degree that gave me the confidence and tools to make something real out of a legal career that, at times, had felt uncertain and unnecessarily difficult.
I decided to make a pilgrimage of sorts—to Cheers. Yes, that Cheers, the one from the sitcom. The bar is a tourist trap now, but it’s also sacred ground for me. On the second day of the February 1998 bar exam, I ate lunch there. I’d just finished the morning session, and something had shifted. I had written an essay that I had handled the year before as a student at American University Washington College of Law. It was a moment of clarity, familiarity, and—maybe for the first time in that entire grueling process—confidence. I knew I was going to pass. I just knew.
I sat at that bar and ordered a Chicken Caesar salad and a Sam Adams Boston Lager. It wasn’t celebratory, not yet—but it was defiant. It was my way of saying, “You’re going to make it.” I finished the beer, walked back out into the biting cold of a Boston February, and finished the exam.
This time, 27 years later, I ordered the same thing. Same salad. Same beer. The barstools had changed, and the faces were different, but the memory hit just the same. I could see my younger self—tired, anxious, hopeful—sitting there and not fully grasping how much that moment mattered. Not just passing the bar, but reclaiming control over a legal education that, for me, had too often felt like a series of institutional letdowns.
Boston University gave me what American University never did: clarity, precision, and the sense that my work actually meant something. That I was building toward something real.
Back at Fenway later that night, I watched the Mets lose—because of course they did—but I didn’t care. I had walked the same streets I walked when I was becoming who I am. I had raised a glass to the man I used to be and the man I’ve become. The Mets didn’t win, but I did. And every time I walk into that ballpark or sit in that bar, I remember that.
