Please circle Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2010, on your calendars in red ink. Your kids and grandkids will ask about it someday. It'll be studied in civics classes. The Smithsonian will probably dedicate an exhibit to it. It is the day that the city of Boston, indeed, our entire region, lost its collective soul. This realization first occurred to me as I walked across a forlorn Boston Common and into an empty State House at 10 o'clock that morning only to have a nice security guard tell me that the Legislature had canceled activity for the day because of the weather. At that hour, friendly little flurries were falling from a modestly fretful sky, yet schools were already shut down. Government workers were told to stay home. All over Boston, cars parked on bare pavement were getting ticketed and towed. The next day, politicians shrugged. A weatherwoman playfully put a bag over her head. The non-event quickly got dubbed 'The No'Easter,' and the 'Nostorm.' But all this really avoids the point. It's not that the system missed us; it's that even if it was a direct hit, we were expected to get a grand total of 6 inches of snow. It didn't used to be this way. Twenty or so years ago, it would take an all-out hurricane to get us excited about the weather. Dick Albert would show footage of torrential rains and punishing winds from North Carolina, then advise viewers to get some candles and a deck of cards to ride out the storm. As time went on, we added your basic blizzard to our list of meteorological concerns. Then the run-of-the-mill snowstorm somehow slipped in. And a few years ago, without any announcement, we began running for cover over an average snowfall. Meteorologists trumpet it days ahead of arrival. Politicians hold press conferences in bunkers discussing plow deployments like troop movements. It's going to snow. In New England. In February. Can you believe it? In this buildup of hype and fear, what's next? Five years from now, Tom Menino will be summoning camera crews to the depths of City Hall to announce his plans to battle an impending April shower. Menino: 'We're asking all nonessential workers to clear out of downtown Boston before puddles form, people get their footwear wet, and we have an epidemic of stuffy noses.' A decade from now, picture Governor Ayla Brown briefing the media at the state Emergency Management Agency about a run of bad humidity, complete with charts on what this kind of scourge does to an otherwise healthy head of hair. In 20 years, be ready for the Department of Public Health to demand that armories be open for shelter on particularly sunny days. There's a larger point here. It used to be we were a famously hardy people, New Englanders, flinty and resourceful. We accepted endlessly miserable baseball seasons to bask in the aberrant years that were any good. We dealt with epic traffic jams on the old Central Artery not by whining, but by leaving early. The weather, miserable from late November through Easter, shaped our persona. We didn't just know how to persevere; we were proud of our perseverance. But now, in this everyone-gets-a-trophy society filled with coddling parents who protect their kids from the most minor of elements, Boston is a city that has come to expect success and smooth sailing, and when we don't get it, maybe we're not sure what to do. We don't need a blizzard any more to panic. We don't even need any snow. Reporter's note: At least a couple of dozen readers kindly wrote to point out that when I called Wall Street bankers 'glutinous' in a Wednesday column, I probably meant 'gluttonous.' I'd love to tell you otherwise, but I apologize for the mistake. 