I used to believe, although now I don’t know, that growing and growing up are analogous, that both are inevitable and uncontrollable processes. Now it seems to me that growing up is governed by the will, that one can choose to become an adult, but only at given moments. These moments come along fairly infrequently - during crises in relationships, for example, or when one has been given the chance to start afresh somewhere - and one can ignore or seize them. At Cambridge I could have reinvented myself if I had been smart enough; I could have shed the little boy whose Arsenal fixation had helped him through a tricky patch in childhood and early teens, and had become someone else completely, a swaggeringly confident and ambitious young man sure of his route through the world. But I didn’t. For some reason, I hung onto my boyhood self for dear life, and I let him guide me through my undergraduate years; and thus football, not for the first or the last time, and through no fault of its own, served both as a backbone and as a retardant.
— Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch
