Oh, we had piles of bottled water and dry foods stocked in the basement, and all the residence's computer screens were darker than night. Primal fears underlay the outward celebrations of the millennium. Some people swore the year 2000 would bring technological chaos, or an old-fashioned End of the Word cataclysm. And I was living through it, a skinny, careful kid with no history who dreamed of making some, someday.

The nightmares hadn't started yet.

Mine. And everybody else's.

We all are so much older now, and not much wiser.

I'm twenty-four and hold that TV microphone in my hand on a windswept scrap of high plains turf called Kansas, reporting the continuing aftermath of that landmark night and its unexpected revelations.

Ironic, how all the pundits, religious and secular, had feared the wrong bogeymen when the twentieth century turned its hoary head over its shoulder to mark the end of the second thousand years after Christ with the sharp slash of a scythe. Before 2000. After 2000.

I'd been taught the religious implications, of course, and even back then had a reporter's dubious eye about ballyhooed adult events. Later, I understood it all even more.

The apocalyptic crowd had predicted Armageddon, the Antichrist abroad, raising Hell quite literally. The dark, evil dead would be drawn from their graves to battle the Lord of the Second Coming and His legions of shining angels.

World leaders had feared a terrorist cascade of bombs bursting across the globe to broadcast religious strife, anger, and hatred.

Computer geeks had predicted that Y2K, the Year 2000 in their geeky shorthand, would short-circuit computer programs the world over. The preprogrammed 0000s and 1111s would go berserk with the stress of recording the unprepared-for calendar shift to 2000, plunging us all back into the chaos of an abacus age.

They were all right in a way, and all wrong.