That magical first weekend of fall was this past week. The air was chillier and crisper, football really started to feel like football, and there weren't any clouds in the sky. And, as fall rolled in with the first orange leaves hitting campus grounds, the dads rolled in with it.

The moms did too, of course, because if you haven't caught my drift already, I'm talking about parents weekend. Many college campuses saw their parents again for the first time since August and the reunion spirit was in the air. Unless you were parentless this weekend like myself.

But I'm not bitter, and I'll tell you why. While my own parents did not make the New England drive up from Connecticut to Boston, many other parents did. And I will say that it gave me a newfound appreciation for not just parents weekend as an event, but the whole concept of parents in general.

Here was my realization: we as college students are in a great stage of life transition in which parents are moving just a bit further away from being just parents and starting to inch closer to that border of friendship. In other words, parents are cool now, and it's a great thing.

I found myself wanting to hang out with my friends' parents this weekend, wanting to have conversations with them, and wanting to have fun with them. And I did; everyone did. It also made me wish I could hang with my own as well.

Some might attribute this new bond to the fact that we as college kids are maturing. It's a "you adult, I adult, we all adult" type of situation we're in at this point in our lives. We're starting to figure out the world for our own, all while surrounding ourselves with the people that already have.

But I think it has more to do with the whole process of letting go that comes with college. Parents and kids have been forced to step back from one another and the new space has allowed them/us to form new connections, to see new ways to relate to each other, and to see that we're more alike than we ever gave ourselves credit for.

And in all honesty, I have to say that I came to this "parents are cool" epiphany mostly by seeing moms cheers-ing red solo cups with daughters, parents popping champagne bottles in the mods, dads having shotgun contests with their sons. Not very deep stuff, I know, until you sit back and really get to thinking about it.

It was hard to see when we were younger, but parents are our friends. It may have taken most of us a solid two decades to figure out that our moms are chill and our dads can hang, but all in all, they're pretty cool people. Let's remember that from now on.