More and more aspects of the games themselves — coaches’ challenges, lockouts, concussions, doping, the Department of Player Safety — have been telling me for a while now that it’s time to go.

Also, Twitter trolls. Sports was never meant to be this angry.

It’s a young person’s game now, or younger anyway, so read Iain MacIntyre’s beautifully crafted prose, and Ed Willes’s, read Bruce Arthur’s sweeping sports-as-life soliloquies, read Scott Stinson in the National Post and Sean Fitz-Gerald in The Athletic and Sportsnet’s Mark Spector, who still likes me even though I sold him an eight-year-old ’82 Olds Ciera whose transmission promptly fell out. But by all means, read.

This job has taken me to or through 30 countries, on every continent except Antarctica, wholly or partly on the company dime.

And about that company … it was owned by the Southam family when I joined up in 1975, then became Hollinger under Conrad Black, then Canwest under the Asper family and now Postmedia, but it’s been the same newspaper chain, with the odd addition and subtraction, through 41 years of never having to go looking for work and always being treated like royalty.

Thanks for being my friends, and critics, and readers. It’s been a blast.

-Cam Cole of the Vancouver Sun at the National Post where you can read more of his 'retirement' column.