Though I was born prematurely, I’ve begun to think that I was really born late, about ten years too late, because I was born with a love for films in which the most pressing issues are high school graduation and how to talk to girls, and consequently I missed all the best ones. This genre, the end-of-high-school coming-of-age romantic comedy, reached its apotheosis when I was only nine years old. No such film made during the decade of my own nervy bildungsroman is worthy of being mentioned in the same paragraph as Say Anything, the last, best 1980s teen movie and, despite what other people will tell you, Cameron Crowe’s only truly good film.

It is twenty years to the day since Say Anything was first released in theaters, and Crowe’s superlatively likeable optimist, Lloyd Dobler, began his assault on the world. Dobler, played so naturally by John Cusack that writer Chuck Klosterman accuses most people of assuming that Cusack is Dobler, is more than an optimist—he’s a big, likable, unstoppable ball of “I can do it”-ness. Lloyd Dobler is the summer after high school in the flesh.

The story of the film is touchingly mundane for a teen comedy—kickboxing enthusiast Lloyd has a crush on beautiful valedictorian Diane Court, whose father is under investigation for tax evasion, and a number of problems involving the relationships between these three individuals play out over the course of a summer. Lloyd and Diane come from “different worlds,” of course (don’t they always?)—but in a remarkably cliché-free hour and forty minutes, and with the help of Peter Gabriel on the boom box, they end up on an airplane taking off for England and happy ever after.

I am unashamed to admit having seen this film somewhere between eighty and one hundred times. And still I hold my breath when Cusack says, at the film’s end, “when you hear that smoking sign go ding, you know everything’s gonna be OK.”

The anticipation! This optimism is all hormones and youth, of course—Lloyd and Diane would really have no hope as an adult couple, and Crowe knows it, which is why the story ends with the fairy-tale ding a few seconds later.

Among my worst nightmares is a sequel to Say Anything which begins with this ding. Then on the screen flash the words TEN YEARS LATER, and we see Diane as a researcher working on an important project for an international NGO and Lloyd in a gym “kicking punching bags,” as Diane’s father warned. He brings back take-out for dinner, but she doesn’t have time to eat because she’s in a meeting, and when she finally does get home it turns out he was so tired of waiting around that he went down to the pub to see the Clash tribute band, because it turns out he hates living in England and the music is really the only thing that appeals to him, and there are no opportunities for a kickboxer in London, and he wants kids but Diane isn’t sure, and there are more problems with her family back in the states—

This is starting to feel like blasphemy. Say Anything is a movie about hope and possibility, and our culture, I think, fetishizes the end of high school as the best, or only, time for hope and possibility. There is something to this. During the inevitable graduation kegger scene, Dobler tells his career counselor that he’s looking for a “dare-to-be-great situation.” I look at the students I am teaching now—only ten years younger than I am—but the possibilities! The internships, the summers abroad, the sheer choices! I no longer feel possibility in the free and easy way they do; yes, I am young, but I have things that Lloyd and Diane never had in Say Anything—a career, student loans, a spouse. I sometimes fear I have missed my dare-to-be-great situation.

I do still have hope. It is the Easter season, and He is risen indeed. I know all that. Honestly, though, I live in a rather nervous kind of hope, one which waits, tendons taut, for that tiny, metallic hammer to usher in the end of worry.

Where’s the ding? Diane, a first-time flyer, asks Lloyd.

And I’ve just made a decision, like Diane, to take a fellowship halfway across the world. I think it’s the right thing to do. I think.

It’s coming, he tells her—a long pause as they watch and wait.

And I am imagining the next few years, and all I can think of are terrifying adult words like health insurance and thesis defense and family.

Any second now.

And I am hoping we will someday hear the sound that tells us everything is going to be OK.

Any second now.