Despite frequenting the University of Florida, U.S., campus since 1994—first as a student, then as an employee—Alisson Clark had never noticed the inscription in the concrete in a well-trodden section of the Gainesville campus.

“Cheryl, if love could be like trees, you would be a forest.” The inscription was signed only ’77, presumably a reference to the year. 

“I was walking back to my office from lunch one day and I happened to look down,” said Clark, a writer in the university’s research communications department. “I talked to a lot of people, and they had never noticed it.” 

Clark paired up with colleague Emily Cardinali, who has since left UF, to try to track down Cheryl and the mysterious suitor—we’ll call him ’77. Knowing their search would involve a lot of phone calls, Clark said, they decided a podcast would be the best format to tell the story of their search for Cheryl. 

“We knew it would make a good audio story, and the serial mystery element seemed fun. All we had was a first name and a year, and we didn’t know for sure that Cheryl was a student.” 

But first, research: They began in the library, where they immediately hit a snag. No yearbooks had been published between the years of 1973 and 1984.