Honorable Mentions

Could've been so beautiful
Could've been so right
You can't hold what could've been
On a cold and lonely night

Tiffany’s wistful words whispered straight to my soul in 1987. She was far from the best teen pop singer at the time (Debbie Gibson, anyone?), but top 40 music was the source for a great deal of my late middle-school inspiration.

What could have been—the road not taken—could be of little consequence, although that’s hard to say due to butterfly effects. Then there are the turning points in history, moments when a near-miss clearly alters the world's outcome.

Let’s look at a few of these honorable mentions today, those pivotal moments in history that had the potential to significantly change our world but, for various reasons, fell just short of doing so.

As a reward for reading this piece, here’s Tiffany: