When you’re fortunate enough to cover golf like I have, you’re often asked to rank certain events. I’ve said before that covering the 2005 British Open at St. Andrews was the coolest experience of my career, and I’d put Phil Mickelson sinking an 18-foot birdie putt for his first career major at the 2004 Masters as the most dramatic.

But the event that may have trumped them all on pure significance alone was watching Annika Sorenstam play against the men in the 2003 Colonial.

As I write this, Sorenstam is about 30 minutes away from announcing that “she will retire from competitive golf at the end of this season”:http://www.golfdigest.com/golfworld/columnists/2008/05/gw20080516sirak, and surely a lot of attention will be paid to her 72 career wins and her 10 majors. She will likely go down as the greatest women’s golfer of all time, but I’d go so far as to say she deserves mention among the greatest athletes in any sport in any era.

How much her missed cut at the Colonial has contributed to her legacy is open for debate, but it’s important to know it came before the string of copycat appearances by Michelle Wie, and at a time when women’s golf in general was dismissed as little more than a fringe sport. But even in missing the cut with a 71-74, Sorenstam showed the gap between the men’s and women’s game wasn’t nearly as wide as originally thought, and it proved she in particular was better than advertised. Moreover, it inspired an entire generation of athletes—many of them women, but men as well—to test themselves outside their comfort zones.

More than anything else, the image that resonated with me those two days was not Sorenstam parading down the fairway followed by a massive throng of media, but the scores of little girls on their parents’ shoulders cheering her on. It was goose-bump material, and even as it was going on before me, I knew I’d never cover anything like it again.

Five years later, I still have a picture from that week hanging above my desk in my home office. It was of Sorenstam watching the flight of her ball, with me looking on directly behind her. That picture first ran in Golf World, and the moment I saw it, I called the photo editor asking for a copy.

It was cool enough to have a front row seat for history, but even cooler knowing I’ll always be able to prove it.