This is the season of graduation, we can see students everywhere are sharing photos of their most precious moments, but one father-daughter went viral for making graduation day even more special.
Tori Roach, 19, posted a picture of her big day in May 2018 on Twitter when she graduated from Huntsville High School in Texas, and she also honored her father with a throwback picture, where the little Tori can be as a baby in her father’s arm as her father celebrated his own graduation day from the same school in a green cap and gown.
Alongside that throwback shot, Tori shared her high school graduation day picture where she is on her father’s arm and kissing him on his cheek.
“18 years later,” she wrote, including a pair of emoji.
“For everyone asking, yes this is my dad, he’s 37, and no he isn’t single,” she wrote in a follow-up tweet. “I have another sibling on the way.”
The tweet went viral quickly and thousands of people retweeted it.
“I’m from a small town and nothing like that ever happens over here,” Roach tells PEOPLE. “I didn’t expect it to blow up like that! Once it started happening, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh!’ I called my family and I was like, ‘Everyone’s sharing the pictures!’ ”
It garnered more attention over the weekend, as more thousands of internet users liked and retweeted the picture.
“I woke up and I had a ton of notifications … People had started sharing and liking and commenting all over again,” Roach tells PEOPLE. “My dad was really proud. We’re from a small town, so nothing like this really ever happens. And he was like, ‘That’s so cool!’ “
Roach lives with her father Dennis Roach, stepmother Jamie Roach and new baby brother Silas Roach in Huntsville. She says her family found the old photo last year when they were searching for baby pictures of Roach to display at her graduation party.
Roach said It was her aunt’s idea to recreate the photo, of the father-daughter duo.
“It was really cool because it was the same place that he graduated from!” Roach tells PEOPLE, noting that she felt just a bit awkward sitting in her father’s arm to pose for the photo. “For me to be in the same place that he was 18 years before that, it was really cool.”
She adds: “It brought me and my dad closer in a way because we could share that moment, and I feel that not many other people get to experience that.”
Roach is a student at Sam Houston State University and her plan is to recreate the photo again when she graduates from the school in 2022.
“It’s in the same town that I was born and raised in,” she gushes. “When I graduate from Sam, it’ll be in the same stadium that I graduated in from high school and the same stadium that he graduated in from high school.”
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