The generation that grew up with Harry Potter learns to cut the cord.
By Alexander Manshel ’09
Though I was only 10 at the time, I imagine that J.K. Rowling and I felt quite similar during the summer of 1997. Me, on the cusp of shedding my cumbersome youth, the quick expansion to double-digits, my first zero. She, on the verge of publishing her first novel, an unlikely tale of witchcraft and wizardry, and the first of many royalty checks with, well, many, many zeros. We were both nervous, excited, straining to accommodate such saltatory changes in our lives.
It was some months later when I picked up a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Here I discovered a world of fantasy and enchantment, magic wands and flying brooms; a world without parents, a world without school, a world of 11-year-old wizards.
Also 11, I wondered when I too would receive my letter of admission, my phoenix-feathered wand, and Nimbus 2000. It seemed to me—and, I suspect, the thousands of other 11-year-olds who comprised the first generation of readers—that Harry and I were two of a kind.
Unfortunately, this period of joyful concomitance did not last long. As Rowling’s pen began to slow and my awkward pubescence only accelerated, the disparity between Harry and me—both in age and, to my surprise, magical skill—only widened. Before I knew it, I was packing for college, deciding whether Harry or Holden would be the last boy in the box of books.
Once at Middlebury, it became rather difficult to leave Harry behind. Perhaps it was the pastoral campus nestled in the rolling hills or the various Commons—Wonnacott, Slytherin, Brainerd, and Cook. (One could only wonder where the deans kept the sorting hat.)
Struggling with conflicting messages, told to grow but left in the dream world, there seemed only one reasonable solution for us, the first generation of readers.
Stripping our beds for capes, raiding custodial closets for brooms, a group of us began a weekly game of, yes, Quidditch. And this is where people usually stop me. “But how can you play Quidditch,” they ask, in that tone that conflates maturity and condescension, “if you cannot fly?” And they were right. We could not fly. There was no magic here—at least not the kind that turns beetles into buttons and kid brothers into rodents.
And it was this position, caught precariously between youth and adulthood, fantastic flight and grounded realism, that became the game’s centerpiece: the awkward image of a young man tumbling full speed down a field, with a broom between his legs.
The inaugural season culminated in the first annual Middlebury Quidditch Cup, a campus-wide tournament with 75 participants and more than 150 spectators. In the end, the Falmouth Falcons came away victorious. The prize? A golden trophy forged together from juvenile figurines and a plastic bottle of—shall we say —firewhiskey.
And while I have since retired as the first Collegiate Quidditch Commissioner, Middlebury’s team carries on magnificently. From what I hear, intercollegiate matches are currently being scheduled. NCAA regulations concerning broom weight and cape length can’t be far behind.
Three thousand four hundred pages and more than a decade later, the series, along with Harry’s long and arduous adolescence, came to an end. As I set down the final book, I felt my feet twitch a little, apprehensive, as they floated gently back to the ground. Harry and I were once again in the same position, asking the same question. In a world without house rivalries and transfiguration, Quidditch capes and custodial closets, professors of art, liberal and magical, what comes next? I suppose there is really only one reasonable solution. Put down the broom and start running.