This time of year is always pretty busy with playoff basketball in full swing. Some teams hang around longer than others, which is the nature of the postseason, but the end result still means an awful lot of time going back and forth to Rochester.

Anybody who has made that drive often can probably agree that it’s not the most entertaining of trips. Wind turbines, I’ve found, don’t look that much different from one mile to the next. Sure, every now and again you might get a pretty sunset, but after awhile you get to the point where you just wish the sun would quit being so dramatic and set already.

Make the drive enough and one starts looking for the Pure Pleasure sign as a beacon in the night, pointing to the idea that Rochester is just there on the horizon.

I’m pretty sure that’s not the intention of the sign, but it will work in this capacity for now.

Regardless, trips to and from Rochester, especially when driving solo leave a lot of time to think, time for retrospection. And last weekend I was doing a lot of that.

Myself and Rocky Hulne were on our way back to the office after a long and exciting day of Section 1 girls basketball playoff action that saw Austin upset the No. 1 ranked team in the state and Lyle-Pacelli move on to the section title game thanks to an Abby Bollingberg buzzer-beater, which will have played out by the time you have read this. They will either have won and gone on to the state tournament, or lost, season over.

However, it’s not the two teams I want to center on, but a pair of individuals from them: Anna Meyer, LP head coach and her younger sister, Elyse Hebrink, who started for Austin that Saturday.

There is good reason why I want to concentrate on both, because whether they are aware of it or not, they are partially the reason I’m feeling old these days. Granted, 45 isn’t over the hill, but you can kind of see the peak from here and I blame the Hebrink family more than most for this.

Not angrily of course, because I’ve come to consider the Hebrink family as friends over the years, but that doesn’t forgive them for the egregious act of make me feel old.

It should be established at the get-go that I didn’t intend to stay in Austin when I came here in 2004. This was going to be a stop-over on the way to the StarTribune, where I would be covering the big events of the day, covering professional football from the sidelines and carrying around lenses bigger than my head.

But that was 2004, and obviously I’m not on the sidelines of the Minnesota Vikings, but I do cover Packers so there is that.

This is where the Hebrink family comes into things. Since my first days in Austin, I’ve covered a Hebrink in one fashion or another every year and it started with Anna.

I’m not entirely sure when I started photographing Anna on the court as we both will probably agree that was a long time ago, but I believe it would have been her junior year.

It was at the same time that I came to know her mom, Suzy, who was coaching the Riverland women’s program and from there it just became a constant parade of Hebrinks. I was even photographing, often times unintentionally, Hebrinks I didn’t even know. For instance, I had no idea that at a tennis match I was photographing Tate and Seth Hebrink playing alongside the courts for a feature photo.

Nor was I completely sure that it was Elyse I was photographing at the end of the Riverland bench, swinging her feet on a chair, laying into a sucker and making herself a part of the huddle during timeouts.

Then there was Gretchen and Sophia who played multiple sports through the years, which all leads me to think …

It’s almost like there was a family plan to see how often they could make the paper. I don’t want to say conspiracy, but it was a conspiracy.

Suzy and I were talking about this after Austin’s big win Saturday, in which I took offense at the idea that other family’s kids were making me feel old. I understand parents going through the process, but why do I have to suffer through it? And now each time I see a Hebrink graduate I think — “I’m turning to dust.”

This is all inevitable of course. I can’t turn the Hebrinks off from making me feel old, but it doesn’t help.

Near as I can tell, I won’t be running out of Hebrinks in the near future. Elyse will be here for a couple more years and there is still Cole on the horizon, but imagine how old I might be when that comes to pass?

I mean I’m going to be old, old and now I’m thinking about that.

The only remaining mystery in all of this is how James has managed to escape the lens. I suppose I could just start taking pictures of the crowd during games, but that would probably look a little weird.

The Hebrinks by far aren’t the only example of families I’ve followed through the ranks, just the only family I can recall where I covered at least one every year since 2004.

Wait … am I secretly a Hebrink and simply playing the role of the weird uncle that photographs everything?

Great, just when I wasn’t feeling weird enough.