Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened

Every Harry Potter trailer we get triggers the same conversation.

Or rather, it raises the same question: “Why doesn’t anything feel like this?”

To be fair to the upcoming television series (December 25, 2026), it feels surprisingly different from the original movies, and that’s a good thing because now you have a reason to watch it.

If the show were just like the films, you would have re-watched the films. Even the additional content (storylines in the books that the movies ignored) would not have been enough to justify sticking with the TV show for seven seasons.

Now, I usually roll my eyes at every Harry Potter-related announcement because I haven’t touched those novels in nearly two decades. So naturally, I keep assuming that my obsession with the franchise is dead and buried.

But then I see the trailer. I hear the music. I see that familiar motif: the wands, the gothic architecture, the wizard robes, and suddenly, a switch flips. Suddenly, I’m ten years old again, lying on my stomach on the floor in a dark room (2000s load shedding), a Harry Potter novel open before me, the soft glow of an oil lantern illuminating the pages.

That memory usually comes with a physical reaction: a full-body shiver, a tingle cascading down my back, a warm flutter in my chest. We had a similar discussion whenever a new Fantastic Beasts trailer debuted. Then we revisited the topic at the height of the Hogwarts: Legacy drama.

Now, I could be wrong, but in all those cases, I remember blaming my physical and emotional response on nostalgia. I assumed that every piece of promotional material I saw was merely reminding my brain of better times. But now I’m not so sure.

Nostalgia definitely plays a role. But that is only a small part of the equation. If I’m feeling nostalgic, what am I nostalgic for? Old me would have spoken of ‘whimsy,’ a term that many associate with the playful, lighthearted energy you observe in children, a mindset that sees magic in every blade of grass and rejoices in the smallest delights.

Current me disagrees. Whimsy is part of the equation, but I think it goes even deeper than that. Do you know what I felt while watching the latest Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone trailer?

Elements of ‘mourning’ and ‘longing.’ It was not merely the joy of reading those books as a child that I remembered. It was also the intensity of that joy. The purity. Have you ever seen a young child receive a gift and be so excited it paralyzes them?

Their eyes go wide, their mouth falls open, and every muscle in their body clenches because the emotions surging through them are a geyser they cannot control. They feel so much that they don’t know how to react.

I suppose that explains the occasional crying. And in truth, that also happens with adults, but rarely. Experts call it ‘Hedonic Adaptation.’

Your brain adapts to everything it encounters, pleasure included. The more you experience, the less intense your enjoyment becomes. Every so often, a foreign sensation comes along and blows your mind.

But as a result, subsequent sensations of a similar type will never reach the heights of that first thrill. Entertainment is no different. The content we consume during childhood hits harder because everything is new. You don’t have the burden of years of prior experiences.

I have high hopes for HBO’s Harry Potter series. But it cannot recreate the blissful escape I got from the novels as a child. I suppose that is okay. Nothing lasts forever. To quote a wise Doctor, “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”

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