Kasdan closed his speech with this deeply personal tribute to friendship, and the moment was made especially poignant by the circumstances of the day itself. He had skipped his own commencement in 1970, and many of his college friends had done the same. Twenty years later, they all showed up together to finally attend — his commencement speech became their belated graduation ceremony. His friend Bruce had joked: 'Larry, if you had been speaking 20 years ago, I would have gone.' The fact that his entire college friend group traveled back to Ann Arbor two decades later was itself proof of the principle Kasdan was advocating. These weren't casual connections but relationships actively maintained across years and distance. The advice was characteristically practical and specific — not vague platitudes about valuing friendship, but concrete actions: go to the weddings, keep trying when someone gets sloppy about staying in touch, cross the globe when someone needs help. He promised that if they did this work, 'your friends will become a precious touchstone in your life; there aren't many things more valuable.'