Tying in to Brian Michael Bendis’s hyperbolically bloated statement about Halo from the other day, it’s pretty obvious that one of this generation’s touchstones is going to be Harry Potter.

And now, a generation of children who grew up with the Harry Potter series is learning the fate author J.K. Rowling has for the boy wizard who was with them through it all.

Makenzie Greenblatt, a 20-year-old student at the University of Washington, began reading Harry Potter in 1999 when she received the first book in the series for Hanukkah. Back then, people barely knew the significance of a lightning-shaped scar when her friend’s little brother dressed up as the boy who lived for Halloween. Now the cultural boom is inescapable.

“It’s been weird to watch the phenomenon of it spread and to see how big it’s become,” Greenblatt said, dressed in a witches hat, cape and Harry Potter shirt at the recent midnight premiere of “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” in Seattle.

In the past decade, Greenblatt and her peers hoarded every word of Rowling’s unfolding series. Now they’re in college or at their first jobs, but their love of the wizarding world has not abated.

“Harry Potter is part of a shared cultural heritage. It serves as a touchstone for their experience that they can look back on, and binds them as a group culturally and generationally,” said Philip Nel, an associate professor of English at Kansas State University who teaches a course on Harry Potter and wrote “J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Novels: A Reader’s Guide.”

PS: I’m old.

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