A little under one hour from now, the long wait will be over and the die-hard fans will walk into the first 12:01 AM screenings of the last Star Wars movie ever. And then I’ll do the same eighteen hours after that.

I have to admit that my feelings at this moment are bittersweet. In a way, it’s like the last day of high school. I’m eagerly looking forward to signing yearbooks, accepting my diploma, and having the time of my life at the all-night graduation party, but I’m also sad because I’ve realized that a really big chapter of my life is coming to an end. As the Emperor once said to Luke Skywalker — or will say, depending on how you look at it — “Only now, at the end, do you understand.”

What I understand is this: the whole Star Wars saga, all six episodes, and all the fanboy craziness that goes along with it, will be finished after this weekend. There will always be DVDs, of course, and tie-in merchandising and conventions and our memories. According to Uncle George’s recent statements, there will be a new cartoon show and a live-action TV series set in the SW universe. But the communal experience of Star Wars as a series of movies seen with a thousand strangers in a big, dark theater — the experience that truly defines the Star Wars phenomenon — will be done. There will never again be a movie phenomenon like it. Not on the same scale, not in the same way. Not one that will span generations and decades, as Star Wars did. Something special and magical really is winding down.

Driving home from work tonight, I passed the Century 16 movie theater in Salt Lake. It’s a big multiplex on the corner of two major cross-streets. There was a line of people wrapped around the building, from the box office all the way to the rear parking lot. I had no way of telling how long they’d been waiting. Maybe they’d been there since before the sun set; maybe they’d only recently queued up. But they didn’t seem to be impatient or grumbly, as people waiting for something to happen so often are. On the contrary, everyone I observed in that line while my car idled at a red light was happy.

There were people dressed as Jedi and Sith, and even one lone Tusken Raider. There were kids whacking away at each other with toy lightsabers and grown-ups brandishing plastic blasters. There were people playing board games, and talking to people they’ve just met, and telling stories and laughing. There were stereotypical fans, the sad, overweight, socially awkward slobs who for once felt as if they belong. There were closet fans who looked perfectly ordinary and un-slob-like. And there were families of fans, parents my age who saw the original trilogy as children and who are now sharing the new trilogy with their children. The anticipation of these people in line was palpable. Like the Force, it was a genuine, organic energy generated by all those living beings, and directed toward the one thing they all have in common: the desire to see one particular movie. That energy made me smile. It made me reluctant to drive away when the light finally turned green.

And it made me wish that this weekend wouldn’t pass as quickly as I know that it will. Because I don’t foresee another film series coming along that will produce this kind of excitement. At least not for people my age. Maybe the children of the early 21st Century will experience something similar before they grow up. But for us Gen-Xers, it ends tomorrow and will likely not come again. Not for us. And that thought makes me feel very old.

We’ve been here before, of course. We thought the Star Wars saga was over with once before, back in 1983. And that’s something else I’ve come to understand: that whatever their flaws and disappointments, the prequels have been a tremendous gift to us thirtysomethings, because they’ve allowed us to re-experience something we thought we’d closed the book on twenty-two years ago. Maybe the recent episodes of the saga don’t deserve the excitement we older fan-types have heaped upon them. Maybe our anticipation is entirely artificial, whipped up by skilled marketing flacks and our own overheated childhood memories. Maybe people like me are so eager to feel like kids again, if only for a brief time, that we’re acting like Pavlov’s famous dogs, salivating to the sound of a badly tuned bell. But the excitement is there, and it is real. I felt it in ’99 and I felt it again in ’02 and I’ll be feeling it tomorrow night when the lights go down and the Twentieth Century Fox logo appears.

I’ll probably have my complaints with Revenge of the Sith. I’ll probably start picking it apart within hours (if not minutes) of seeing it. I know a lot of other people will hate it. But I am confident that for the two hours and forty minutes the film will take to unspool, I will be a wide-eyed little boy of seven again, sitting in a giant room filled with a bunch of other grown-up children.

We owe George Lucas our thanks for that much, at least.