For five years running, twenty-four men have flown to a different city in late spring to play one hundred and eight holes of golf together.

The trip started in St. George, Utah. Then Boise. Then Lexington. Then Bend. This year it's Deadwood, South Dakota. The number 108 is roughly six rounds across five days, which is the maximum number of rounds you can play in five days without permanent injury. We have not always succeeded at avoiding that.

The trip is not about golf. The trip is about what happens when twenty-four men commit to a single weekend at the same time, on the same date, every year.

Most adult friendships die not from conflict but from drift. A friend moves. Another friend gets married. A third has a kid. The calendar fills with appointments that take precedence over the meals you used to have on Tuesdays. Within a few years, the friendship has not ended — it has simply stopped happening. You still text on birthdays. You still mean to see each other when one of you is in the other's city. You still consider him a friend in the technical sense. But the relationship is, structurally, a memory.

A ritual interrupts the drift. The week in May is on the calendar before the calendar fills. The flight is booked before the conflict arises. The wives know not to schedule anything. The bosses know not to call. The kids know dad will be back Sunday night. The friendship has been given a fortified outpost on the year, and twenty-three other men are obligated to defend it.

The trip has cost me a few work assignments. It has cost others business deals, weddings they had to skip on the second-cousin side, school events they negotiated their way out of. None of us has missed the trip. Most of us have missed something else.

A friendship maintained by intention is fragile. A friendship maintained by ritual is structural.

If you have friends worth keeping for thirty years, put a date on a calendar that none of you can move.