After more than 18 years together — not counting their initial nine months wedged in the tightest of quarters — the Magoons are disbanding.
The lacrosse-playing quadruplets — Mitch, Mike, Matt and Madison — graduated from Grandview High School in Aurora on Thursday and now will head in opposite directions.
Despite years of reliance and camaraderie, the foursome is ripe for some time apart.
“So ready,” says Mike, the quiet genius who plans to study computer science at the University of Denver next school year. “It’s going to be nice.”
In the meat of an emotional month filled of last-evers — the last lacrosse games and the final moments of high school — the Magoon squad isn’t pining.
PHOTOS: More images of the Magoon quadruplets
“After 18 years, it’s time for a separation,” says Matt, the gregarious salesman who plans to study marketing — and maybe finance — at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley.
What are they gonna miss about each other?
Silence. And not that hold-on-while-I-pick-from-all-those-options silence. Knowing glances. Giggling.
It’s more about what they won’t miss.
Madison had a boyfriend that her brothers adopted as one of their own.
“It was a bromance,” says mom Vicki, the only Magoon, including the family hounds, lacking the M-squared initials.
“They would tag along on every date,” Madison says.
“Which was awesome,” says Mark, their quick-to-laugh dad.
The car is a point of contention. Madison, Matt and Mike share a convertible Mustang with only two sets of keys. Mike doesn’t drive much — at least not since he crashed into a light pole in an icy parking lot after work at the mall — so it’s really just Madison and Matt.
“We fight about gas more than anything else,” says Madison, who is venturing the farthest away, riding a lacrosse scholarship to Grand Canyon University in Phoenix.
Mitch, the ever-tinkering mechanic, avoided the car drama by buying his own. He borrowed $1,000 from his grandpa a couple of years ago, picked up a beater and fixed it up. Traded that for a 1974 Dodge Dart and did it again.
“He’s the Craigslist king when it comes to cars,” Mark says.
Now Mitch has a custom-built truck that he’ll be taking to the University of Wyoming in the fall, where he plans to study engineering — mechanical or petroleum.
Hang out for a few minutes with the Magoons and it’s hard to detect similarities among the four, despite a lifetime of shared moments.
“It’s mind-boggling. I always think about that,” says Mark, looking toward Mitch.
“How does he get the fix-it gene? I couldn’t fix anything. Matt likes to go out and talk to anybody. Mitch will talk to you if you want to talk cars,” he says. “I just sit here all the time and say, ‘Man, they are so different.’ “
Don’t look alike
The Magoons don’t look much alike. They don’t have many crossover friends. At Grandview High, which is huge, with more than 2,800 students, they weren’t known as quadruplets. Most teachers didn’t even know they were kin.
Their first year at Grandview, Mitch, Matt and Mike were featured in a yearbook profile as the triple threat of the freshman lacrosse team. The story noted them as triplets. There was no mention of Madison, also a freshman lacrosse player at the school.
“She was like, ‘Really, you didn’t tell them I was your sister?’ ” Vicki says. “What the heck? Come on!”
Still, the four finish each other’s sentences. (Really, all six of them do.) Their communication is almost extrasensory, with knowing smiles and heavy doses of grief that flow from nearly two decades together.
They are more similar than they admit. Lacrosse is a common thread, and all four kids are excellent players. The boys picked it up early, slapping sticks in the spacious backyard of the east Aurora home where they have lived for 16 years. Madison came to the sport after watching her brothers play.
“Of course, for her it was ‘And I’m going to be better than you’,” Vicki says.
That competitive edge stoked a pressure to excel on the field, said Grandview’s lacrosse coach Patrick Chapla. But what really stood out was the Magoons’ bond.
“When one of them would have trouble, they were all there for each other,” Chapla says.
Mike was “our most positive player,” Chapla says. Matt dug deep when he slipped from a starting position, willing himself back into the top spot.
“One day, he went out there and just killed it and totally earned his spot,” Chapla says.
The competitive streak is strong among the Magoons. Especially Madison. It’s fed her success on the lacrosse field.
“She’s fierce,” Vicki says. “She has to be, growing up with three brothers.”
“They taught me everything I know,” says Madison, opening up a bit with a rare bit of praise for her family.
And she takes a jab for it.
“That’s a good answer,” says Matt, a bit snidely.
“She’s trying for Brownie points,” says Mark, again with rumbling laugh. “She wants the car.”
All four hold jobs. Madison works at a nearby restaurant. Mitch works at HotShots Automotive, where he interned as part of a Grandview engine-building class through a technical college. Matt works at the Waterway car wash down the road.
Nearly two decades ago, Vicki and Mark had tried in vitro fertilization twice and nothing stuck. They had four embryos left for a final try. They decided to go all in.
The first ultrasound revealed three beating hearts. Mark panicked. Vicki celebrated.
The second ultrasound showed a fourth baby: Madison. “Then she was the one walking into walls,” Mark says.
At birth, Matt was the biggest, at 2 pounds, 9 ounces. Mike was the smallest, only 1 pound, 14 ounces. The parents used spreadsheets to track those early months. Binders of color-coded charts detailing feedings, medicines, diapers and sleep.
“They basically became colors,” Mark says.
Those spreadsheets are long gone now.
“Now, it’s just chaos. It’s just people coming and going,” Mark says. “I went out for work on Tuesday, and I didn’t have a car to drive to the office because someone took my car to school.”
No gradual changes
Mark, a salesman, is stoic about the rapid change on the horizon. The Magoon homestead will soon lose its bustle. Another sudden life change for Mark and Vicki.
But a lack of transition, Mark says, is “the story of our life.”
“Most people have gradual changes. We don’t do that. All the phases that kids go through, we just hit it to the extreme and learn quick,” Mark said. “You learn to change diapers quick when you are changing freaking 120 a day.”
Vicki isn’t hiding her angst at the pending departure of her children. She says she’s heading for “crier’s anonymous.”
“It’s been hard to watch them do the last things these last few weeks. The last lacrosse game, they walked off that field for the last time,” she says. “You lose all those things all at once. It’s not a gradual thing you slowly give up.”
The four-way split to different colleges wasn’t intentional.
Each Magoon just followed their interest. Matt to business school, Mike to computers and Mitch to engineering school. Madison liked Grand Canyon when she visited for a lacrosse game. She seems excited to live with a girlfriend in a dorm, her first time away from three brothers.
“I guess we did it right because they are not sitting here going, ‘We can’t leave,’ ” Vicki says. “They are ready to leave one another. They are ready to go and they are ready to fly. And that’s a good thing.”
Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374, jblevins@denverpost.com or twitter.com/jasonblevins
