Given how Ready Player One performed at the box office over the weekend (much to the consternation of a fair amount of you on this site), it seems appropriate to focus this week on nostalgia. Pop culture often evokes memories of major events in your life, whether it’s a childhood milestone, something special with your significant other or something tied to a major thing that happened in the world.

I’ll give you three off the top of my head:

1. As any video game loving kid from the late 80s could tell you, there was no greater achievement than beating Mike Tyson in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out. Try as hard as I could, I never could do it…until one fateful Saturday morning when all the pieces came together. I was so in the zone that I didn’t care that my dad had thrown his back out and my mom was yelling at me to come help. I had Iron Mike on the ropes. When he finally went down for good, I jumped about five feet in the air. That feeling of elation was totally worth getting banned from my NES the rest of the weekend.
2. On a downer note, on 9/11/01, after having watched the towers fall over and over again on TVs around the Syracuse University campus, I needed a respite. That came in the form of Diablo II. For six straight hours I shut myself out to the world and focused on defeating the demonic hordes. It helped me cope with the greatest tragedy my generation had witnessed.
3. Lastly, on a happier note, the first night my now wife and I spent together, we watched Labyrinth (making fun of Bowie’s overly inflated crotch the whole time) and Blades of Glory. I have great memories of both of those movies as a result.

So this week’s question: What are your most vivid real-life memories that center around works of pop culture? As always, spoiler tags are appreciated on any new-ish works. Also, if you decide to graphically describe how you lost your virginity to Journey’s “Open Arms” (or something similar), spoiler tag the dirty parts (this isn’t the Night Thread!).