I want to be clear that I have nothing against the river turning green. The river turns green. I understand this. I have watched the river turn green every year since 1995, and before that my father watched it turn green, and before that his father watched it turn green, and at no point in this family tradition did any of us require a VIP viewing platform, a ticketed riverfront brunch package, or a podcast episode dropping the following Monday explaining what we had witnessed.

The first time I watched the dyeing, I was at the railing on the Michigan Avenue Bridge with my old man and maybe two or three hundred other people. It was cold, which it always is, because St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago is in March, which is still winter, which everyone who has lived here more than one season has accepted. We watched the boat go out. We watched the orange powder hit the water. We watched it turn green. My father said something like “there it is” and we walked to a diner on Wabash and ate eggs. That was the event. We felt good about it.

Last year, by the city’s own estimate, 400,000 people gathered along the riverfront for the dyeing. Four. Hundred. Thousand. The Michigan Avenue Bridge had a waiting line that started forming at five in the morning. Five in the morning. The river turns green at nine. The people in line at five in the morning were not standing there because they deeply understood the tradition of Plumbers Local 130. They were standing there because the algorithm had told them the river was a thing you needed to see, and they needed to be in front of it before the other people who the algorithm had also told, and they needed a horizontal video of it, and they needed to post it by nine-fifteen or whatever window they were working within. I do not begrudge these people. They are not wrong. The river turning green is genuinely remarkable. I just want to know where I’m supposed to stand.

The bars are another thing. I have nothing against bars. I live within walking distance of three that I consider acceptable and one that I consider fine on a Tuesday. What I object to is bars that have existed for twelve months charging a $45 cover to enter at 6 AM and describing this as a “premium St. Patrick’s Day experience.” What experience are you premiuming? You have put green food coloring in a domestic beer. You have a playlist of U2 songs and one Pogues song that you will play eight times. The Pogues song is “Fairytale of New York,” which is a Christmas song, and I have mentioned this to bartenders twice and been ignored both times.

The parade is fine. The parade has always been fine. The parade goes up Columbus Drive, it has been going up Columbus Drive since 1956, it has bagpipes and floats and politicians waving from the backs of slow-moving vehicles with the specific expression of people who are cold but cannot show it. I have no objection to the parade. The parade is one of the things Chicago does correctly and has done correctly for seventy years without needing to rebrand or disrupt or optimize. What I ask is only that we leave it alone. That we not add a “viewing experience tier.” That we not have a sponsored moment where someone hands out free samples of something. That we let the bagpipes be bagpipes without a corporate logo on the drum.

My friend Colleen Fitzgerald — she grew up in Canaryville, her family has been in this neighborhood since before the parade was a parade — told me last year that she stopped going downtown for St. Patrick’s Day sometime around 2015. “It’s not ours anymore,” she said. She didn’t mean Irish people specifically, though she is Irish specifically, third generation, her grandmother came over through Boston. She meant the people who knew what it was. The people for whom the river turning green was not content but just a thing that happened every year, like Thanksgiving, something you could watch without performing.

I am aware that this is the column that old newspaper columnists are contractually required to write, the one that says “things were better before,” and I want to acknowledge that awareness and tell you I’m writing it anyway. Because sometimes things were better before. Not always. Not even most of the time. But the St. Patrick’s Day river dyeing was better when you could get to the bridge without registering for a wristband and you could see the water instead of the backs of several thousand phones held aloft.

I’ll be there tomorrow at seven in the morning. I have my spot on the Lower Wacker level, which has fewer people and a better angle and which I will not be sharing the exact location of in this column. I’ll watch the orange powder hit the water. I’ll watch it turn green. I’ll probably think about my father. I’ll walk to a diner afterward.

It is still the best thing this city does. I am only asking that we remember why.