B.I.O.: A Love Since Childhood

MOMS ALWAYS DREAM their daughters will marry the boy next door. Katie Landi's mom has to settle for the guy across the street. Upon spying Brad Jordan playing basketball the day her family moved to the neighborhood in 1994, the 10-year-old coyly caught his attention. "I grabbed my basketball and started bouncing it in our driveway so they would ask me to play." It worked. They became pals, but it wasn't until a decade later that their relationship turned amorous, when they caught an OAR show at Wolf Trap. "It started as a group of friends, but midway through the night, I realized I wanted to be, needed to be, more than friends," says Brad. Three and half years later at the National Gallery of Art's ice-skating rink, he took it a step further. "I pulled Katie to the center and told her she already had everything that meant something to me, and that I wanted her to have the only thing left — my last name." They'll wed Sept. 27 in Stafford, Va.

Brad, 26, is an IT project manager. Katie, 24, is a legislative aide. They live in Woodbridge.