It was no simple task selecting the overall winner for our annual How We Met contest, for which we gathered entries from our seven newspapers and picked one grand champion.

But we read so many inspiring, funny, sweet...

We meet new people every day in any number of ways. 

Some encounters are brief. Maybe it’s the person serving us coffee on the way to work or the random stranger we bump into while buying groceries at the store. Most of the time, our...