Yeah, right - equity in a barrel of red ink. Pass.

Of course you know how it turned out: my friend is now a millionaire and I'm not. Many people, especially people in their 20s and early 30s, have played one or the other role in a similar drama in the past year, often centered on one of the dozens of runaway initial public offerings of Internet companies in the last few months. By now it is a familiar tale, and it always turns on who made out and who missed out. But missed out on what exactly? Typically, the answer comes down to worth, as measured in dollars. How can so-and-so be worth $10 million when she's no more talented than I am? How can that jerk be worth $25 million when everyone can see his business is a joke? Did you hear about those kids from Kansas who are worth more than $100 million? No one from Kansas gets to be worth more than $100 million, do they?

That's how I felt, anyway. But I was missing the point, because there's something else going on here that actually made me feel worse than a lost seven-figure payday. Sometime in the last few months, the I.P.O. boom crossed over the line from being a matter of economics to something else - a kind of cultural happening, experienced firsthand by a very small number, but whose symbolic power so transcends the moment that it will in time serve as a kind of generational shorthand. What I had turned down was a ride to Woodstock.

If you had to choose the parallel to Richie Havens coming onstage, you could point to the birth of Amazon.com or Yahoo! or maybe Netscape. But I would pick the I.P.O. of Theglobe.com, last November, as the moment when the acid kicked in. Two kids in their mid-20s were suddenly worth more than $70 million apiece, as the stock of their new company - which had something to do with chat rooms and building home pages - posted the biggest first-day gain in history. After that, the gap between believers and skeptics seemed to widen. The ubiquitous hedge-fund manager Jim Cramer, the Timothy Leary of the hour, would later draw a line that transcended generation: “In my business, there are two kinds of people, those who make money and those who critique those who make money.” Yeah, man, you're either on the bus . . . or off the bus.

I don't know anyone who has made use of Theglobe's services, but not so long ago I did meet a young woman walking a puppy named TGLO, which is the Theglobe's stock ticker symbol. It's not quite the same as naming your daughter after “Chelsea Morning,” but you see what I'm getting at. It was right around that time, in fact, that my friend at the Internet start-up, which was soon to go public, called to give me a kind of second chance: 500 “friends and family shares,” which is to say a chance to buy a tiny fraction of the company at the official offering price. It wasn't the sweet deal a senior insider would get - huge numbers of options that cost far less - but if the stock rocketed up like other dot-com companies, it was far better than anything available on Main Street. And that, really, is the whole point. I wanted to get in on something that most people couldn't, even though all of them knew about it. So what if I didn't have any intention of making a long-term commitment to the stock? Love the one you're with, right? I wrote a check and waited to see if, perhaps, I would be in time to hear a few notes from the distant stage.

I held onto my shares for about five days, cashing out for a profit in the very low five figures: chump change compared with what might have been, but on the other hand not bad considering that it actually topped the starting annual salary of my first job out of college in 1990 - which now seems like another era entirely.

I was lucky. By late May, when barnesandnoble.com rose a mere 27 percent on its first day of trading, and two new Internet stocks the next day actually closed below their offering prices, it was as if someone had walked up to the microphone and warned, ''There are some bad options going around.'' Even TGLO had dropped 60 percent in less than two months. The bacchanalia will probably continue, sure, and there may be imitations for years to come. Perhaps TGLO will rebound by the time you read this, or perhaps it will end up the Sha Na Na of the I.P.O. boom. These are difficult times to predict. But something feels different. Every new Internet offering alters, however subtly, the calculus of the market, brings us one step farther away from the moment of change and into the moment of the already changed. At some point, the world really does get split into before and after: the giddy claim that a generation of visionaries saw how to alter the world can no longer be ignored, however preposterous their vision appears from the outside and however viciously it has been derided by wise observers. And then all you can do is look back and try to figure out when, precisely, that happened, and either remember what it was like to be there or exactly why you weren't.

Even now, though, with the Internet sector as a whole sunk well below its dizziest heights and with many market watchers saying the moment has forever passed, the true believers insist that the revolution has just begun. We'll see. The only thing that's certain is that, a few years on, yet another generation of smug revolutionaries will emerge, defined by yet another exclusive experience. They'll point out how the I.P.O. boom failed to deliver on its promise and sneeringly dismiss its believers as mere opportunists. That's why wannabes like me are already working on our revisionist sound bites: Sure I tried the market, but, you know, I didn't inhale.

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This story appeared in the June 20, 1999, issue of The New York Times Magazine.