If you ever go through a newspaper’s archives, you’ll see the same stories appearing again and again.

Something is over budget. Someone wins state. Someone dies too young. Later this year there will be Black Friday stories about crazy people lining up for cheap TVs. Year-in-review stories. Lose-weight-in-the-new-year stories.

One perennial story that I never get tired of reading: the against-all-odds graduation story.

These just take my breath away.

My friend Elisa Crouch at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote one of my favorites this year, about an often-homeless student at a tough school where 83 percent of the kids fail the state’s math exam. 83 percent failure! Eboni Boykin is a varsity cheerleader. She leads Bible studies. She went to a journalism camp at Princeton. Now she’s headed to Columbia University on a full scholarship.

There’s been a lot of coverage of the student in North Carolina who is Harvard-bound. Steve Lyttle of the Charlotte Observer wrote a beautiful story about how even after she was abandoned by her parents and survived by working as a janitor at her own school, Dawn Loggins managed to make As. It gets better. She is setting up a foundation to help other homeless students.

The San Antonio Express-News published one this week by Francisco Vara-Orta about twin sisters who were orphaned when their mother was shot, then faced a tough childhood bouncing between family members. Adriane and Aundrea Davis are both going to college on scholarship.

It’s the best of what it is to be human – to face terrible odds in terrible surroundings, but lift yourself out. To cling to hope, to an idea, because it’s all you have. They’re a reminder of how astonishing people can be, and what the possibilities are in life.

I could read these all day long.

– Jen