While sitting in a chair on New Year's Eve watching the big lighted ball in New York city get ready to drop, I started reflecting on the year past.

I started thinking about how odd it seems to go from the year '00 to the year '01. The 1900s are officially over, left to historians to decipher, while the 2000s are just arriving. Think about it, for the next thousand years, people will have to start their date with 2-something. I think we should have just started over at the year 0 and began again. If you need to know which millennium it is, you're most likely not living in the right one anyway.

As for the year past, the infamous 2000, it ended with a real bang. As the little ball dropped on my television set, I had a friend who got a real nice surprise to begin the new millennium.

I won't print his name here, since I didn't ask him ahead of time, but I will tell you what happened to him. My friend, we'll call him Mike, had saved a bottle of champagne for his New Year's party ever since November of 1999.

He looks at wine and champagne about the way that I do - I don't get any of that old dusty-bottled stuff for my friends, I always make sure I get a nice fresh bottle. Of course, I come from a place where wining and dining often entails a bottle of Ripple and your choice of value meals. At any rate, I was talking about him saving that champagne. I was awestruck when he told me that the bottle he planned to open was nearly two years old. I was further impressed when he explained that it had a cork in it instead of a screw cap. Like I said, we have similar taste in wine.

So here it is, four minutes to midnight, and he breaks out the long-lauded bottle. He untwisted the copper-colored retaining bands and took off the little metal hood. He loosened the cork slightly by giving it three or four good twists and counted down the last 10 seconds with his thumb on the bottle-top.

As he got down to three, he pushed on the cork. It was a bit stubborn, so it didn't really come lose until right about midnight.

That is when all time froze for an instant as the little cork flew across the room. He looked down at the bottle with a big smile on his face as the slow motion sound of the "pop" still hung in the air. Just about the time the cork ricocheted off the ceiling, the champagne realized that it was free at last.

Holding the bottle with one hand, his smile turned to a look of complete surprise as the contents of the bottle decided that the living room in general seemed much more inviting than the little green prison it had been pulling time in. Like I say, it was almost two years old - really ancient stuff.

Back to my scene, still frozen in time. Well, almost frozen. The stuff came out of the bottle like a bubbly rocket, shooting at least three feet in the air. Being a sensible man, he tried to cut his losses by covering the top of the bottle with the first thing that he thought would work: his mouth. That was a mistake. It came out his nose, it sprayed into his face and in his eyes, it even shot out of his ears. Well, maybe not his ears, but it had to have been close to that point. The look on his face was the most valuable part of the entire thing. It was one of those looks of complete surprise that makes life worth living. Not only that, he was a good sport about the whole thing. Some people might get pretty mad if their friends laugh at them while two-year old Cold Duck comes out of their nose, but not Mike. He just got a towel and buffed off his head and took a good swig. He had a look on his face right then that said, "1999, it was a good year for Cold Duck."

Funny I can't remember whether or not he fetched that bottle himself or if his wife got it for him. Hmmm. Shake, shake, shake....It makes you wonder, don't it?

So, after sharing the season with my friends, I realized that perhaps the changing of the year is an annual let down. But perhaps that isn't the point anyway. Maybe the whole idea is to enjoy our time here no matter what year it is.

Life is always losses and victories, challenges and good fortune followed by bad. We will all succeed at many things and fail miserably at many others in our chosen path.

The best thing I can hope for you is that, someday, you will be on hand as someone unknowingly opens a two-year old bottle of cheap champagne.

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