The Web link sat there, tempting me to face the dream that I had let die in the last few months, the final link between who I was and who I was about to become.

"Congratulations," the letter began, "you've been accepted into Boston University."

It was like a punch in the gut.

Secretly, I'd been hoping that my dream school would flat-out reject me. I hoped I would never come close enough to what I'd always wanted, only to have it taken away by the idea of the financial burden it would impose on me for the rest of my natural life.

Instead, there it was. I was good enough to get in. I was worthy. It didn't matter that I wasn't the smartest in my class. It didn't matter that my ACT score wasn't drop-dead gorgeous.

I clicked on the financial aid package.

It was enough.

But not enough to compete with what UNL was willing to give me.

My stomach turned, I closed my computer, and I went to bed.

The next afternoon, my parents stood over my shoulder in the kitchen as I showed them my options. For the past four years, my mother and I had argued constantly over college. How could I possibly afford Boston? Why did I want to go so far away? What would happen if I was injured in a freak accident and she couldn't be by my hospital bed in the less than 45 minutes it takes to speed down I-80 going to Lincoln?

"You need to follow your heart," my dad said in a moment that was all too perfectly clich.

"It's doable," my mother said, always the more money conscious and practical of the two.

That afternoon, I drove around Aurora and looked at the place where I had grown up, past everything that I had ever hated and had ever loved and everything that made me who I am. I drove past McDonald's, the first "real" job I had ever had, and past the volunteer theater, where I had slept in the projection booth while running movies on weekends. I walked around the square and stood underneath the limbs of its ancient trees, whose leaves I used to love to crunch in the fall when they were crisp and dying.

I realized that my choice came down to two simple ideas. I could do the safe thing and stay in Nebraska and spend the rest of my life wondering the great "what if?" Or I could take a chance and follow my heart, risk an immeasurable amount of debt and know that I tried, even though I could fail.

In the end, it was my heart that won out.