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A baseball fan threw out the first pitch at Wrigley Field after receiving a life-changing kidney donation from a stranger

Chicago Cubs fan Bridgett Kolls was living with stage 5 kidney disease when White Sox fan Thomas Alessio stepped up to the plate

“I think if you can help someone, you should,” he said

A Chicago Cubs fan threw out the first pitch at Wrigley Field six years after she received a kidney donation from a stranger who roots for the rival team across town.

“I never expected to be here,” Bridgett Kolls said while at Wrigley on Wednesday, May 6 in a video shared by ABC 7 Chicago. She was selected out of approximately 500 people who were nominated to throw out the first pitch.

“This is such a wonderful moment here with my donor. I never thought I’d be throwing the first pitch. I’m happy to be alive every day,” she continued.

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Six years ago, White Sox fan Thomas Alessio changed her life by providing the then-23-year-old with a matching donor kidney even though the two had never met.

“If you have the ability to help someone I feel like you have a duty to do so,” he told the local news station.

Alessio learned that Kolls was in need when she went viral for bringing a homemade sign that read “This lil Cubbie needs a kidney” to a Cubs game years ago.

“We came up with ‘this little Cubbie needs a kidney,.” Kolls told WAVY of how her message reached the masses. “They put me on the Jumbotron. They took photos of me … they put me on social media, Twitter, Instagram, any and all the social media, and my phone was blowing it up.”

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In 2017, she’d been diagnosed with stage 5 kidney disease and lupus and was in desperate need of a donor, per the news station.

Alessio, who was on the bone marrow donor list and previously donated plasma to those in need, didn’t hesitate to help.

“I had a friend that shared the Cubs post online, and I ran into it,” he told WAVY. “Obviously, I don’t follow the Cubs on any social media as a White Sox fan, so I just randomly saw it, and it went from there. So I just think it’s one of those things where life is really precious, and I think if you can help someone, you should be able to because I think there’s a lot of people who don’t have the chance to be helped, and like to have something like this happen.”

Kolls now works as a nurse at Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital while she’s enrolled in college, and is grateful to Alessio for stepping up to the plate.

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“I’m active, healthy. I get to move. I’m not tired all the time, it’s a big difference,” she told ABC 7 Chicago.

“It does show there’s good people in the world and Cubs and White Sox fans can get along,” Kolls told WAVY.

The Cubs fan also plans to attend her first White Sox game this baseball season.

Read the original article on People