We thought we'd gotten so much tougher about winter, didn't we?
No more panicked runs to the supermarket for bread, milk and toilet paper at the first hint of snow.
No more jittery conversations around the office about when the storm would hit and when we could make a break for home without drawing too much attention.
No longer would we shoot anxious looks at the sky and fixate on weather updates from Bob Turk and the great Tom Tasselmyer. Or spend hours nervously watching news footage of salt trucks hitting the streets or Rob Roblin gleefully jabbing a yardstick into a snowbank to give us accumulation totals.
No, we were so over that.
The huge snowstorms of a year ago — howling twin monsters that dropped more than 20 inches each — had steeled us, given us confidence in our mettle.
Winter didn't scare us anymore. Ice didn't scare us. Snow didn't scare us. OK, we weren't exactly Green Bay or Minneapolis or Buffalo, where it starts snowing in October and ends around the Fourth of July.
We were little ol' Baltimore. But by God, we could handle anything Mother Nature threw at us. And we wouldn't flinch. We wouldn't whine. We wouldn't back down.
No, we'd square our shoulders and thrust out our jaws. We'd look the storm in the eye and snarl: "Go ahead, give us your best shot. We can take it."
Well.
That didn't last too long, did it?
Uh, no, it sure didn't. Because the simple truth is this: When the Great Snowstorm of Wednesday Night struck, we reverted back to being the snow wusses we always were and probably always will be.
Maybe Thursday's headline in The Baltimore Sun said it best: "First major snowstorm brings much of the area to a halt."
It was a cold slap in the face from the weather gods, a reality check, a warning not to get too smug about our ability to handle the White Death.
Oh, sure, it didn't help that the storm hit during rush hour, giant, heavy, wind-whipped flakes pounding from the sky as thousands of commuters took to the roads.
Chaos ensued. It was the fall of Saigon minus the helicopters swooping in. The Jones Falls Expressway turned into a parking lot. Ditto stretches of I-95, the Beltway and every other major roadway.
Twenty-minute commutes turned into four-hour nightmares. Trips that normally took an hour turned into nine hours. People abandoned their cars, grabbed the keys from the ignition and began hoofing it.
Where were they going?
Who knew?
One minute they were there, cursing their luck and pounding the steering wheel in frustration. The next minute they were flinging open the car door and heading into the blinding storm, ghostly silhouettes who might — or might not — show up hours later, frozen and exhausted, at a nearby Red Roof Inn or Dunkin' Donuts.
Unless you fled town via sled or toboggan, it was the same no matter how you traveled. Flights were cancelled. Trains were late. Bus stations had all the calm of a medieval castle under siege.
The power went out for 120,000 customers in the BGE service area. Or 210,000 customers. Or 475,000 customers. Or 2 million customers.
Who really knew? BGE didn't even know. The totals kept changing so rapidly, it was like watching the big board at a telethon.
By late Wednesday evening, if you called BGE, you got a steady busy signal. And who could blame them for not picking up?
Snow was blasting out of the sky and the world was ending. And on their end, all they were dealing with were cranky customers irate that a cataclysmic snowstorm might cause them to both freeze to death and miss "Live to Dance" or "Cougar Town" on TV.
By Thursday morning, things were slowly returning to normal — sort of.
A fresh blanket of white snow covered the land and an eerie calm ensued, as if after a great battle.
The streets were quiet. Many couldn't get into work, trapped in their snow-clogged neighborhoods, staring out the blinds and waiting for the snowplows to rumble through. Those who did manage to get to the office huddled with colleagues and sipped coffee and exchanged horror stories about the nightmare commute the previous night.
But a little of the swagger was gone from all of us.
We thought we were ready for winter. We thought we had shed our rep for being snow lightweights.
Looks like we were wrong.
(Listen to Kevin Cowherd Tuesdays from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. with Jerry Coleman on Fox 1370 AM Sports.)