Losing a friend and a colleague is never easy. It’s worse when that passing comes far too early, well before the quality work has ended and well before the friendships have drifted away.

The local media lost one of our best last week with the untimely passing of Adam Munsterteiger. A friend to everyone he ever worked with, including coaches and “competitors” alike, Adam fell victim to an illness that took his life at the age of just 46.

Adam was the guy when it came to providing quality coverage of all things Colorado Buffaloes. A graduate of Arizona State University, Adam was the publisher and lead writer for BuffsStampede.com since 2003. His coverage of his adopted program became more than a job for him. It began with his unmatched recruiting coverage – a staple of his site’s early years, when he was reaching out to virtually every single high school prospect in the state. He would get to know them, help to promote their stories while protecting their thoughts and whims before anything became final – whether they signed with CU or not.

Adam cared deeply about the college game – lamenting the impact of Name, Image and Likeness payments to players well before they became legal and grew into the completely out of control mess we have now. He was always realistic about the status of the CU programs, but always optimistic as well. He was one of only a handful of regular media members that covered CU who head coach Deion Sanders actually liked. That’s because it was impossible not to like Adam, regardless of which team you covered or who you rooted for.

The best thing about the many notable things about Adam was that he didn’t just care about the stories he’d write, he cared about the student-athletes he was writing about. Again, whether or not they landed in Boulder, these area high school prospects had stories to tell, and they needed someone they could trust to tell them to. Adam could have been all about “breaking news” in the highly competitive format he worked in. He could have always been striving to be the first to announce a student-athlete’s school of choice, even before the athlete wanted to make that choice public. More than once, he sat on a potential breaking news story so he could defer to the student-athlete and his or her desire to make that announcement at a time and place of their choosing, not his. He was a man – and a journalist – of character.

People like Adam Munsterteiger are the reason that artificial intelligence will never completely take over coverage of the sports we love to watch and read about. AI can provide the nuts and bolts of game coverage – the score, the stats, the basics. People like Adam – and his is a breed that’s dissipating year by year – can provide a voice for the human element, the emotional and poignant details that make a story worth reading and a player worth watching.

The website Adam made so popular will continue in his absence. It will have facts and opinions and interviews and videos about the Colorado Buffaloes… but it will never be the same.

RIP, my friend.