I used to live in Virginia, working for DXC (formerly CSC) in Tysons Corner. I worked there from July 2013 until December 2019. For the first four years, I had an apartment in Prosperity Flats on Dorr Avenue. It was easy to take the metro to the Amtrak and go back and forth to Philadelphia every weekend.

Every Sunday, I take the train from Philadelphia to Virginia. I took the Amtrak to New Carrollton and took the orange metro to the Dunn Loring-Merrifield station.

This Sunday, January 14, 2014, I arrived at the Dunn Loring-Merrifield and took the elevator up to the street level. When I got there, I saw three men just behind me coming up the elevator. They were wearing ice hockey jerseys. One of them had a Buffalo Sabres jersey. Knowing that there had been a Sabres against Washington Capitals game, I asked him, “how was the game.”

He said it was great.

One of them said he noticed I had a Penn State hat and said he went to Penn State. He mentioned that he was in Phi Delta Theta and I said I was in the same fraternity. I told him my name and his name looked at me shocked and said “you are Billy’s dad”. He told me that Billy was in the same fraternity and Billy and Lauren had recently gone to his wedding. He introduced himself to Shane, his brother Ian, and another fraternity brother Steve Feight.

Shane mentioned that we talked briefly about a few times we had hung out together at the Fraternity House, and some Penn State tailgates we attended together. We also talked about how crazy we met randomly at a DC metro stop because Shane was visiting from North Carolina for work that weekend and came up early to go to the hockey game.

Note: When I recently emailed Shane last week to get some of the details, he told me that it was strange that today was a game with Washington and Buffalo.