CHAPEL HILL, NC–Listening wistfully to his youngest daughter Natalie talk and laugh with her new roommate while he helped the girls set up their room, Jim Cox wished that his own roommate were similarly excited to live with him. Sitting behind him, Sharon Cox, his wife of 28 years, stared at the father of her three children until he grew uncomfortable, looked over his shoulder to meet her eyes, and then looked back down again.

Before her move to Hinton James Residence Hall on Sunday afternoon, Natalie Cox had lived in Charlotte, NC, since just after she started high school, when her father was laid off from his job near Atlanta, GA, and relocated the family for a new, worse-paying one. Natalie was randomly assigned to room with Liz Colburne early in the summer before her first semester at Carolina, and the two immediately connected on Facebook, soon chatting for hours several times a week. Late in July, Natalie and Liz met midway between their hometowns to get lunch and shop for dorm furniture, a trip which affirmed their fast-blossoming affinity.

Immediately after her daughter left that morning, Sharon Cox announced to her husband that she was leaving  for a long weekend at her friend Donna’s beach house and would drop him off at work because she needed the family’s other car.

A few weeks later, just as the Cox family was taking their second load of stuff from the Honda Pilot up to Natalie’s new room, the roommates-to-be sighted each other across the parking lot behind Hinton James, screamed, ran toward each other, and hugged.

“Did you remember to lock the car, Jim?” Sharon said while her daughter was still embracing her new friend. “It was unlocked when we came back down here. You forgot to lock it the first time.”

After helping the girls loft their beds and listening to them joke about keeping each other up too late watching and talking about movies, Jim Cox considered his night before, when, like most nights, he came into his bedroom with his own roommate already asleep, changed in silence, read until he fell asleep with the lamp on, and was awoken several hours later by her drowsily elbowing him to turn it off.

As the girls decided to just share their closet and cabinet space because they were the same size in most things and envied each other’s clothes, he reflected on the brief, strictly missionary intercourse to which his wife acquiesces on Thursday nights, typically drinking three to four glasses of wine at dinner beforehand, and afterward immediately getting out of bed, going into the bathroom, and remaining noiselessly inside for up to 20 minutes.

“Goodbye sweetie,” Jim said to his daughter as the Coxes departed for their newly childless home. “I love you so much. I know you’re going to be happy here.”

As he and his wife walked separately down the hall from the still-open door of the room, he heard his daughter and her roommate resolve to walk their class schedules together the next morning and to head to the dining hall later in the evening with other people on their hall.

“What do you want to do for dinner?” he asked his wife as they got in the car.

“I don’t know, that meal at Spanky’s is making me sick,” she said. “And my neck hurts. I’m going to yoga in the morning. James is teaching again.”

CHAPEL HILL, NC–Early this morning, while Fraternity Court stood empty and strewn with red cups, experts confirmed that the best weekend of the 2014-2015 academic year had come to an end. Researchers at UNC indicated that, during any of the 36 remaining weekends of the school year, students are unlikely to have as much fun as they did in the preceding 72 hours.

“Students didn’t have any work, so they could party and relax without guilt,” said Shannon Nicols, a psychologist at UNC. “Every other weekend will be less fun because people will either stay in to work or feel bad about the work they’re not doing.”

“Nobody at UNC is going to have as good a time as they had last weekend,” she said.

Nichols called particular attention to freshman students, whom she said have passed the weekend pinnacles of not just their academic years, but also their college careers.

“Freshman who expected college to be a continuous stream of socially open, responsibility-free dorm room hangouts and house parties had their hopes more or less confirmed this weekend,” she said, “but virtually all of them will grow disillusioned over the coming weeks.”

“The image of college that first-years have seen in movies is totally unrealistic, except for the 72 to 96 hours before the start of classes,” she added. “Nothing else is like that.”

Many freshmen said that they were unconvinced.

“I’m going to do this every fucking weekend, just getting turnt up with my friends,” said Sally Lunell, freshmen pre-med student. “I love college, it’s like, um, like they finally respect us. My parents were like, ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that,’ but no one says that here–there are no rules. Just get fucking turnt.”

Lunell has not yet read the syllabus for her Chemistry 101 lecture.

For upperclassmen, the report held similar findings, but with different causes. The first weekend of the year, it said, has an exceptionally high “Friends to Fucks Ratio” (FTF) for most returning students, according to information released by the US Census Bureau. The FTF measures the number of interactions between actual friends relative to those with “the fucks you have to put up with but actually kind of hate.”

Darl Nugent, chair of Duke University’s Sociology Department, who also contributed the report, explained that the unstructured time of the first weekend allowed most to avoid unwanted encounters.

“Students returning to school used the first weekend to reach out to friends; without time on campus it’s much easier to avoid raging tools,” he said. “Every other weekend of the year it’s much harder, if not impossible, to avoid interacting with complete fucks.”

The situation is compounded, the report noted, for students in work-intensive natural science majors, for whom the first weekend of the year was also the only opportunity to participate in “the college experience.” Eric Sanders, a junior chemistry major at UNC, explained that, once his classes start, keeping up good grades and having a good time are “basically mutually exclusive.”

Extending the report’s findings, data compiled by the Center for Disease control indicated that the first weekend of the year also stands as the most opportune time for students seeking to lose their virginities.

“It’s definitely the best shot you have all year to pop your cherry,” Surgeon General Boris D. Lushniak told reporters. “People are down to get outside their comfort zone. If you didn’t get it done this weekend, you might as well wait until next year.”

Accordingly, the first weekend was also a highlight for students interested in taking virginities.  

Dan Yelden, a senior undecided major and unofficial chair of predatory grinding at the Sigma Alpha Delta fraternity, said that the first weekend is typically when he and his fraternity brothers can “get most of [their] work done.”

“We get to be real fucking creeps,” he said. 

Asked for her thoughts, UNC Chancellor Carol Folt said that she “just feel[s] bad for all the people who let this weekend slip by.”

“Compared to the first weekend, the rest of the year is basically a pile of dog shit,” she said. “Oh, and for the seniors, I guess that’s pretty much it for you, huh?”