The last time the Phils were in the postseason...

... I had bangs. Not just bangs, but the kind of bangs that I thought needed to be swept from one side of my forehead up in a wave over to the other side.

I could be reached by e-mail at psjj85d on Prodigy. But only if you, too, had Prodigy. Also on Prodigy, I enjoyed playing the quiz game "GUTS."

I taped the Rick Dee's weekly top forty on Sunday mornings, hoping to be able to record such gems as "How Do You Talk to an Angel" and "I Would Do Anything for Love." (Note: if you were a cute boy in my class, I claimed that I was actually a fan of, for example, Green Day, "but only their old stuff." I never was.)

I spent a good amount of time trying on fancy dresses in the mall, in preparation for the ninth grade formal that would occur two and a half years later.

I went to youth group, where we played games like "stick out your tongue and hold this piece of chocolate on it for as long as possible without swallowing your drool."

I made a gigantic posterboard sign to hang on our front porch that said "Go Phils Go!"

I remember finding it completely awesome that one of the platoons that year was at second base: Mariano Duncan and Mickey Morandini, and that if you combined them somehow, their name could be the unbeatable "Mariano Morandini."

I thought I could influence the outcome of games by doing things like dialing "1-800-HR-Lenny" when Dykstra came up to bat. Crazy, huh? Except that the first time I did it, Dykstra hit a homerun. For real.

I had a paper route. I wasn't allowed to stay up late enough to watch the ends of all the regular-season games, but my mom would always come down while I put the papers in their bags to let me know the outcome of the previous night's Phillies (and, erm, Mets) games until the magic number was zero. [Um, as it turns out, the Mets actually won only 59 games that year. Why do I remember it so flat-out wrong? It was the Expos we were chasing down.]

Speaking of which, I had a cat named Zero. Good old girl.

I'm pretty sure I was allowed to stay up during the playoff and World Series games, because I remember approximately 5,000 frantic phone calls from my Nana. The entire conversation would go something like: "He got 'im!" "Yes, Nana, he did. Two outs." "OK!" End of conversation. Two minutes later: "Did you see? He got 'im!" "Right! Three outs!" "OK!"

Le sigh. I would like to be in Philly right now.