When I came back from Christmas break halfway through my sophomore year of college, I walked into a friend’s dorm room, and the axis of my life tilted ever so slightly.

Matt was always back from break before me. He was from the west side of Madison and so didn’t have to make any special plans in order to be back in campus housing (read: out of his parents’ place) as soon as the dorms reopened.

I was usually not far behind, though. I’ve always hated school breaks, which is probably a part of why I’ve spend twelve of the sixteen years since high school studying. Being back in the dorm put me that much closer to being back in a learning routine.

Matt was watching a show in which people talked fast. I didn’t recognize it because I hadn’t really watched TV since middle school. I hadn’t cared much about sports for even longer, so it’s doubly unsurprising that I—along with most of its potential audience—hadn’t given Aaron Sorkin’s first television show any attention.

Sports Night* was, for this mopey but idealistic engineering student in love with the liberal arts, the perfect piece of pop culture. Anchors modeled loosely on Sports Center personas bantered with smart producers, quirky studio technicians, and one über-relatable stats nerd who eventually gets the girl by—it seemed to me at the time—shear force of kindness. Between and during broadcasts and editorial meetings, the gang would argue about romantic poetry, the power of the theater, and all the Culture Wars hot buttons. High minded. Middle brow.

And low investment, sadly, because the half-hour workplace “dramedy” only lasted two seasons. I sat with Matt and watched however many episodes were left. Then I borrowed the DVDs and started from the beginning.

He told me to come get him when I made it to “Eli’s Coming,” the emotional peak of Season 1. The episode was named for a character’s childhood misunderstanding of a Three Dog Night song, which would come into heavy rotation on the nights where we’d top off our cans of Mountain Dew Code Red with Southern Comfort and host impromptu dorm room dance parties.

My opinion of Aaron Sorkin has gotten more complex over the years. Conservative friends have pointed out the effects of his political heavy handedness. Women critics have pointed out his, well, frequent and possibly unwitting contempt for women. And the success of his televisual efforts since West Wing seem to have convinced us all that he’s better off writing features. (That doesn’t mean I didn’t rewatch both Studio 60* and The News Room* out of depressed desperation during a particularly bad stretch of the first year of President Trump.)

Besides all the usual reasons for college students wanting to get out of their parents’ houses, I learned in those weeks that Matt had additional motivation for returning to the dorms: over the break he had started dating a woman named Michelle. Michelle grew up on the far east side of Madison, so getting back in the dorm shortened the distance between them from forty-five minutes in a borrowed car to a single flight of stairs in Turner House, Kronshage Hall.

Michelle liked Sports Night fine, but she was less tolerant of a trend that shot up our list of clichéd college dude habits: quoting dialog. A relentless, belabored, inside-jokey mania took hold of us. We gave ourselves willingly to the cult of Sorkin, offering up our hourly tributes. When we were together, I reckon that a full 5-10% of what we said—at least to each other and sometimes to unwitting passers-by—was drawn from our encyclopedic memory of these seventeen hours of repartee.

Fourteen years later, my rarer and rarer rewatches remind me how many Sorkinian turns of phrase have entered my day-to-day usage. In fact, I sometimes start to feel a little bad about my acts of daily verbal plagiarism. Then I remember that a guy who lives almost directly across the Harlem River from me is making gazillions of dollars from having done basically the same thing, except his source material also includes an impressive percentage of the complete works of Every Rapper Ever and an 823-page biography* of the first U.S. Treasury Secretary.

Of course, the most famous resident of Washington Heights* weaved his tributes into piece of art* that that same Hamilton biographer has boldly but rightly compared to Shakespeare for its complexity and pathos [fact-check needed]. And I don’t think Lin Miranda was too concerned when Aaron Sorkin showed up to see the show that offers so many loving references to The West Wing*. Same goes for when so many of the rappers he idolizes showed up at The Richard Rodgers.

They all know what he knows. Everything is a remix.

*Full disclosure: affiliate links. Thanks as always for supporting the site!