I agree with what Least said in her post.
My best friend during my college years was very often my drinking buddy, and we drank to excess on more occasions than I care to remember. After we both married we lost contact and I didn't see him for 30 some years which I considered a good thing because of our mutually self destructive drinking. A few years ago my wife and he connected on Facebook and then I did too. He happened to live in a city in Florida that we were going to on vacation in a few weeks, and we made arrangements to reconnect after so many years.
It turns out that he was very active in AA and so was I at the time. We ended up going to a several AA meetings together and it was a great way to reinvent our friendship. We both went through alcoholic hell and managed to come out the other side into sobriety.