If you are bummed out because you fell asleep on New Year’s Eve and didn’t get to see the ball drop to usher in what you thought was going to be the third decade of the 21st century, you’re in luck, because you haven’t missed it.

You still have nearly an entire year to contemplate the occasion. You see, the end of the decade will be on Dec. 31, 2020.

No, I am not operating on a different calendar, but I have been a contrarian on this point since the dawn of the 21st century. While most of the rest of the world celebrated the event on Dec. 31, 1999, I waited a year later and rang in the new century at the appropriate time, Dec. 31, 2000.

I wanted to make it a really big occasion, so I was in Las Vegas watching KC and the Sunshine Band perform, among other things.

A lot of my friends said I was crazy until I proved it to them. When we went from 1 BC to AD 1, we did not go through a year “zero.” So, the first 10 years in AD (anno Domini — year of our Lord) were numbered 1 through 10. The decade ended on the last day of the 10th year.

If you extend this concept to the present day, the 20th century did not officially end until Dec. 31, 2000, and the second decade of the century doesn’t end until Dec. 31, 2020.

We in the news media make a big deal with the ending of any year, but we go into overdrive when it’s a milestone year such as the end of a decade, then really go nuts when it’s the end of a century.

This was especially true as we approached the year 2000 and were told that the world as we knew it was about to become dismantled because of the Y2K issue.

The problem started because on both mainframe computers and later personal computers, storage was expensive, so many computer programs stored years with only two decimal digits; for example, 1990 was stored as 90. Some programs could not distinguish between the year 2000 and the year 1900, which could cause dire consequences.

Warnings were sounded of what would happen if nothing was done. Final cost estimates for governments and businesses topped $114 billion to fix or take measures to prevent issues from occurring.

We in the news media summarize important happenings of a year, decade or century as a way to chronicle the impact these events have had on our lives. In some cases, they may have affected us in unusual or significant ways.

This mechanism also serves as a device to give context rather than looking at these events in a vacuum.

It’s also a time to be optimistic that the next year or group of years will be an improvement over what we have just experienced. Although we would like to have 20/20 vision to see what is going to happen as we begin 2020, no such luck. The best we can do is study the past to try to get a glimpse of the future.

While we hope for the best, we brace ourselves for the worst. This is the way of human nature. Wars, terrorism, climate change our inhumanity to each other, the inability of our leaders to be civil to one another for the common good, computer threats, cyberbullying — they have been our constant companions during the past 20 years, and, regrettably, they seem to be following us into the 2020s, possibly even beyond.

Then, of course, with 2020 being a presidential election year, we know that we are going to be bombarded by thousands of negative ads and other contacts hoping to get our vote while making the other candidates look like jerks.

Some official sources align with my way of thinking on the calendar. The Farmers’ Almanac points out that this is the way years are numbered in the Gregorian calendar, the system in official use throughout most of the world. The anno Domini era, or the common era, begins with the year 1 on this calendar.

In fact, the Farmers’ Almanac’s website has an article which suggests: “As you think about New Year’s resolutions, here’s one we should all make together: Resolve to insist that decades begin with the year ending in the numeral 1 and finish with a 0.”

When the U.S. Naval Observatory addressed this question in 1999, it concluded that the new millennium would start on Jan. 1, 2001.

I rest my case.

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com