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In this Aug. 6, 2018, file photo, Luke Perry poses for a portrait during the 2018 Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour in Beverly Hills, Calif.Chris Pizzello/Invision / AP

Even before realizing that Archie’s dad was Dylan, I felt a weird exhilaration about Riverdale shooting up the street. Yes, I am mixing my pop culture metaphors. But if you’re reading this, you are probably following. This is about Luke Perry.

Perry is – was (this “was” feels impossible) – the actor who played Dylan McKay on Beverly Hills, 90210, the smouldering James Dean-esque surfing, hotel-living brooder who won the heart of new girl Brenda Walsh – and pretty much everyone else in TV Land.

The show’s initial central tension was the relocation of the Walsh family from boring Minnesota to the swanky titular zip code. 90210 evolved into a weekly morality play, dealing with issues such as divorce, date rape and AIDS (Dylan famously took an AIDS test before he and Brenda did it at the spring dance). Meanwhile, the kids looked super cute in their high-waisted acid-wash jeans and colourful scrunchies.

The show achieved a popularity that was far incongruous to its quality. It gifted the lexicon with expressions such as bad hair day (at least, it was the first place I heard it), ensured the zip code for Beverly Hills would be forever ingrained in your brain and put Fox on the map.

Critics panned it, but the youth spoke, and Fox stuck with it – programming new episodes rather than reruns during the TV dead zone of summer, revolutionary at the time. And the show became to early-1990s series television what the Backstreet Boys were to late-1990s pop music.

The young actors became superstars. (Well, relatively young actors; Perry was well past high-school age and another cast member was playing a high-school student while in her 30s.) Perry became a teen idol, with those trademark sideburns, raised eyebrows and charming forehead wrinkles.

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In 90210, Perry's Dylan McKay won the affections of Shannon Doherty's Brenda Walsh.Fox Broadcasting Company

His photo was everywhere – on T-shirts, posters, even, as I learned reading an old Rolling Stone profile on Monday, on heart-shaped pillows. (The same article also described how Perry had to be smuggled out of a Seattle mall appearance in a laundry hamper; the fans were that nuts for him.)

I was outside the target demographic for this show, and I didn’t like it very much. Still, for all its flaws, the series was a pop-culture pillar at the time, impossible to avoid.

I’m at the point in life where I remember almost nothing important, but I somehow remember that Perry, in real life, had a pet pig. I also recall one of my heady conversations from that period, when a friend asked me whom I would choose: Dylan or Brandon (Brenda’s twin brother, played by Canadian actor Jason Priestley). I was astounded at the question. Who on earth would pick Brandon over Dylan?

Perry was a heartthrob with a bad-boy persona and a knowing half-smile made for the cover of Tiger Beat. And yet, People never named him a Sexiest Man Alive. An outrage.

When the alert came across my phone Monday, I was in a jam-packed elevator in a medical building. I gasped loud enough that it provoked a rare inquiry as to my well-being from my 10-year-old.

“A very famous actor died,” I told him.

One of the other moms in the elevator asked me who it was.

“Luke Perry." We locked eyes. She understood. He was the choice of a generation.

“He was only 52." The mistake was out of my mouth and audible to my kid before I could stop myself.

I am 52.

Which is, terrible parenting moment aside, why it is so ridiculous that I felt that twinge of excitement over Perry’s proximity when Riverdale moved into my East Vancouver neighbourhood.

Perhaps it was being in nearly the same area code as Archie’s house that led to some recent ruminating over Perry’s Dylan McKay-to-Fred Andrews trajectory and the universal takeaway. One minute you’re the hotshot sex-symbol, the next you’re realistically portraying the sad-sack dad to the hotshot sex-symbol – played by an actor who wasn’t even alive back when your teen-idol self was being smuggled out of shopping malls to avoid your frenzied fans.

And then, the unimaginable.

Well, the inevitable. But far too soon.

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