FINALLY, SHE came down the stairs, and you had to say this much: She was worth the wait.

Slim and pretty in a metallic blue dress, her smile somehow bashful and incandescent at the same time. You'd have sworn it was 1995 and Princess Di had just walked in. Photographers jockeyed for position, cameras flashed from every angle. Then she moved into the next room, where my son, in his white tuxedo, struggled to affix her corsage, after which she tried to pin his boutonniere without drawing blood. The photographers said, "Awwww," and the cameras went crazy again. Prom night, 2002.

With apologies to the composers of the Christmas carol, sometimes I feel as if this, actually, is "the most wonderful time of the year."

Late spring, I mean. It's not just that the days are longer and thoughts of vacation fill your mind. More than that, it's the fact that everywhere you look, you catch young people in the rituals of growing up.

I'm seeing a lot of that this season. Two weeks ago, I gave the commencement address for St. Thomas University in Miami. This weekend, I'll perform the same function for Miami Country Day School. And in between, there was that prom night. Two weeks of caps and gowns, two weeks of first tuxedo and first evening dress, two weeks of corsages and diplomas. Two weeks of ceremony.

The funny thing is that, where I come from - by which I mean the 1970s - "ceremony" was a four-letter word. There was, many of us felt, something false, inflated and hollow in these rituals by which we solemnized passages, acknowledged rank or demarcated the phases of our lives. It was during that decade, remember, that Jimmy Carter asked that the Marine Corps Band not play "Hail to the Chief" to announce his every arrival, even though the song has heralded presidents since Martin Van Buren in the 1930s.

But Mr. Carter's request was very much in keeping with the tenor of the times. Deeply suspicious of authority, pomp and all their signs and symbols, many of us embraced, instead, a radical informality, a loosening of collars, a falling away of strictures. The very fact that a thing was old or had always been done became reason enough to disparage it. The fact that it was new or had never been tried weighed powerfully in its favor.

The result? Nonconformity became the new conformity. Rebellion became perpetual, virtual and vicarious, a commodity for sale to those with sufficient disposable income. It acquired corporate sponsors and media cachet, so much that tie-dyed T-shirts became available in the local mall, with sag-off-the-backside blue jeans following in the years after.

Now, more than ever, things change. That has become both a social and economic imperative.

So I find it intriguing and, in some distant sense, reassuring to look up and see that spring comes and, voilM-', somehow, young women and men are still going to proms and graduations as ever they did. I mean, how long have those rituals been in place, you figure? Since the Paleolithic Era, at least? Yet they're still going on. After hippies, yippies and yuppies. After disco fever, feminist upheaval and gay rights. After Sept. 11.

Next thing, you'll tell me they still have weddings in June and family feasts on the fourth Thursday in November.

There's something I don't think we understood back in the 1970s as we gleefully tossed out baby together with bathwater: The rituals we disdained and the ceremonies we scorned have power and purpose. They are among the increasingly few and fragile tethers that link us, not simply one to another, but to all that came before and all that has yet to be.

They are a common vocabulary, a shared experience, a groove worn deep and smooth and sweetly, bittersweetly, familiar. So that graduates file past as parents scream and applaud their pride - and it feels like a memory. A young couple in formal wear disappears inside a limousine - and it feels like 30 years from now.

It's a reminder: Things change. So it's important to treasure those things that never do.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for The Miami Herald. His column appears Sundays in The Sun. Readers may reach him via e-mail at leonardpitts@mindspring.com or by calling toll-free at 1-888-251-4407.