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May 14, 1998 may not mean much to the average person, unless it was your birthday or anniversary— if that’s the case, congratulations. To a huge chunk of Americans, though, that day was a watershed moment in America’s cultural history. Frank Sinatra suffered a heart attack that evening that would prove to be fatal, but his ambulance made it to Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles in less than 10 minutes because of record lows in traffic. The event that kept the roads of LA clear that Thursday evening was another cultural milestone that overshadowed the death of one of the 20^th century’s biggest figures: the finale of Seinfeld.

I was six years old on that night in 1998, and I was one of 76.3 million Americans who tuned in to see the final episode of the sitcom. I had many memories of television before that point — I remembered watching Friends, Frasier, Cheers, and Seinfeld with my parents — but the night of that finale was the moment I first remember feeling that I was witnessing something huge. I felt like a part of a society bound together by not political beliefs, or religion, but a box in the living room. That night, I knew that television would become an inseparable part of my life.