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Thank you to all that have made Mid-Major Madness great

The time has come for this manager to walk away from Mid-Major Madness.

Bob Donnan-USA TODAY Sports

For the seniors who will be walking across the stage this year, at their respective schools, graduation comes faster than you think it will. Four years goes by in a blur, full of memories that require you to step back and take stock of it all before entering the real world.

And much like those seniors who put their college careers to bed after four years, it is time for me to walk away from Mid-Major Madness.

When I took over Mid-Major Madness four years ago, you could see the tumbleweeds pass through the site when you posted a new article. It was a struggle, but it was a struggle that I knew when I took on the task.

It had been almost a year since anyone had posted on the site. That meant that since Butler had made the NCAA Tournament Finals two years in a row, no one had been tracking basketball outside the power conferences at SBNation.

The site's old Twitter account was in a no man's land -- no one knew who had the password; Twitter wouldn't give it to us; and we just had no idea who created it in the first place. We were going to have to build it from scratch. Facebook was the same way.

And so we posted the very first post for Mid-Major Madness' third chance at life. I won't say it was met with great fanfare, because it wasn't.

For the initial summer, we mostly struggled to get 100 views for anything that we wrote. People just didn't know we were there.

And then we wrote an NBA Draft profile about Jet Chang, a Division 2 kid who somehow landed on some draft big boards. That landed on Reddit, and the traffic started to come in. It helped that we had Butler and VCU transferring into the A-10, and creating turmoil in their former leagues.

We were born and we have had a great time making this place the place to be to come for smart talk about basketball outside the power conferences.

Before we knew it, we were hitting 1,000 page views per day. And then 2,000 page views per day.

And then there was the first NCAA Tournament we covered, and I just watched the numbers on Google Analytics Real Time, as they continued to go and go and go.

We had built it, and people came.

And you have kept coming for the past four years. This site has meant a great deal to me over the past four years, because people have kept coming and kept talking about us on Twitter, and kept talking about us on message boards.

You have kept this dream -- a dream that was more of a nightmare when it first began -- alive.

The time has come for me to walk away, and unfortunately I won't be receiving any kind of degree for this. My life outside of basketball -- both personally and professionally -- is taking more and more of my time, and running a daily site about almost 250 basketball schools is more than I can continue to manage.

That doesn't mean that I will stop covering college basketball. I have too much passion for this sport and its characters to ever walk away for good.

You can continue to keep up with me on Twitter at @bmiraski, and I am sure there will be an announcement at some point, and you can trust that I will find something you will enjoy reading and following just as much as Mid-Major Madness.

I would like to thank the powers that be at SBNation that took a chance and gave me the reins when others had been denied. And I would like to thank all of the writers who have come on board over the past four years -- some who have moved on to greater heights, we hope because of the guidance we have given them -- and made this site what it has become. And I want to thank the fans who keep coming back again and again and supporting everything we are doing to continue the legacy of basketball coverage outside of the major conferences.

Thank you all; good night, and good luck.

See you soon.