I think I felt something like that last sentence — “it didn’t make sense that Dylan McKay was gone” — when, on my way to work on the morning of December 11 (?), 1980, I stopped at my regular newsstand to buy the morning paper and stared disbelievingly at the headline: “Gunfire Kills John Lennon.” I hadn’t watched TV or listened to radio the previous night, so this really was news. I might have stared at it for a full minute before picking up the paper and buying it. I was 24 then.