Posted on October 15, 2015
When someone leaves us forever, when something disappears and we know we will never see it again, a lasting pain remains somewhere inside us.
Slowly, we begin to understand that what we loved is gone.
Something that became part of us.
Something we believed would always remain.
The same feeling can come when a place is destroyed.
Especially when that place has become a symbol.
A symbol of permanence.
A point of reference in our lives.
It is comforting to believe that what we do is right because it is connected to values we have inherited, values that constantly remind us where we came from and help us stay on the path we chose at the beginning of our careers.
Home
Whenever I walk through the gates of the University of Physical Education, I still absorb what previous generations left behind.
I almost feel the weight of my own footsteps knowing that the greatest figures of the institution once walked the same paths.
That feeling never leaves me.
For a moment, I feel connected to them again.
And that is when I know:
I am home.
Every tree is familiar.
Every staircase.
Much has changed.
Yet somehow, the essence has remained the same.
The First Time
I was not yet fourteen when I first entered the main gate of the TF from Alkotás Street.
It was a Saturday morning.
There was time to walk around and allow the atmosphere and tradition of the place to become part of me.
From that moment on, it continued to draw me back.
Then one April morning, another important chapter began in the athletics hall.
We completed several aptitude tests there.
Together with hundreds of other applicants, we prepared for the entrance examinations that would follow three months later.
The hall was one of the central locations of that process.
Some memories never disappear.
I ran my 60-metre sprint there.
During the handball entrance test, senior students looked at me and said:
“You must be a basketball player.”
Becoming a TF Student
I finished among the top five percent.
Together with around forty others, I was admitted to the TF.
After a year of military service, I returned as an adult to the familiar world I had dreamed about every day while I was away.
I wanted it to be real.
And eventually it was.
Because nothing lasts forever.
Even waiting ends.
We gathered in the Aula.
It was there that first-year students became true TF students when, together in September, we recited the university oath.
That place meant initiation in more than one sense.
On December 13, on Luca Day, we also became “real” TF students according to another tradition.
Our godfathers, Géza Polányi and Zsolt Csende, together with the fourth-year graduating male students, presided over the ceremony.
At the table in front of the Aula, our senior judges made sure the initiation would be unforgettable.
Some moments were gentle.
Others were rather less so.
The Smell of the Hall
The smell of the athletics hall was unmistakable.
There was nothing else quite like it.
It was also one of the essential locations of the night-time initiation of first-year dormitory students.
One September night, for example, the traditional arm-wrestling contest between fourth-year and first-year students took place there after we had hurried from the Csörsz field to the hall in frog jumps for an early-morning challenge.
Later, there was a period when we began our immediate pre-game warm-up in the hall’s weight room before heading to Hall D to face our opponents.
At the time, we genuinely believed that bench pressing 100 kilograms before a game was particularly good preparation for shooting.
The quiet atmosphere of the hall on weekends somehow reinforced the confidence we had in ourselves.
Our game classes took place there.
Later, our handball classes did as well.
We cheered for the TFSE handball players there, and afterward they would come across to support us at our games.
Hardly a day passed without entering the hall’s corridor.
At any moment, a friend, a teammate or someone we loved might walk past.
And if necessary, we would greet the same people a hundred times a day.
But nothing lasts forever.
Graduation
Eventually another day came.
Our graduation ceremony took place in the same Aula.
My family came with me.
For a brief moment, they could experience something of what that place meant to us.
Something that, in the early hours of this morning, was lost forever when the fire took everything with it.
Nothing lasts forever.
And perhaps now something new — and possibly even better — will begin.
Another Generation
Twenty-seven years after my own registration, my two sons enrolled in the same place.
They stood in line in the Aula just as I once had.
They waited for their own journey to begin.
While they waited, they looked at the handprints of Olympic athletes on the wall.
And I know they also absorbed the distinctive smell of the Aula.
Like a kind of magic, it connected them to the place too.
I was happy.
Because I knew it would help guide them.
It would help them understand where they were going.
Those who studied there know what it means to serve their profession and what values should guide them.
Within those walls, we received tradition.
We received purpose.
And those are things that can only be used well.
What Remains
That is why what happened today hurts so much.
Something became part of the past.
Something that from now on will exist only in our memories.
And that is why it is so important to pass as much of it on as possible.
To preserve the legacy.
To preserve the stories.
To preserve what those walls represented.
Because without that inheritance, the TF would somehow be less.
And so would we.
