We were different then, younger, less cynical, more hair on the crown of our head, but maybe that’s just me. Colorado, too, has come a long way, baby, since the last time we flipped the calendar on a decade.

We spoke differently in 2010. Instagram, iPad, selfie and Deepwater Horizon weren’t in the public dialogue. Fracking was around, in a jargony sense, but the dirty word on oil and gas didn’t join Merriam-Webster’s dictionary until 2014. 

Vaping would have sounded like the lightheaded spell your great aunt in New Orleans gets if someone mentions dancing on Sunday.

Gay marriage was a movement, then the Colorado legislature passed civil unions in 2013, and the U.S. Supreme Court made marriage for all the law of the land two years later. 

Colorado would write another chapter in the history of gun violence in 2012, when the Aurora theater shooting became a sad complement to 1999’s Columbine massacre.

Gun laws divide us now as they divided us then. After Democrats passed background checks and banned large ammunition magazines in 2013, two Democratic leaders in the legislature were recalled, and another one resigned in the face of it. In 2019, red flag laws to segregate dangerous people from firearms continued to divide people along party lines.

“North Colorado” was a half-baked, fully fizzled proposal by some rural Colorado counties to split off into a 51st state in 2013. Nonetheless, they remain emblematic of the region’s discontent with state leaders they think could care less about their issues — regulation, roads, schools, medical services and high-speed internet.

My colleague and pal Ernest Luning helped me brainstorm about the changes. “Who would have thought … ” he began:

• Colorado would be the first jurisdiction in the world to legalize recreational marijuana.
• Not one, not two, but three state legislators would be out of office due to recalls.
• Two politicians from Colorado would be running for president by the end of the decade.
• In the aftermath of the Great Recession, Colorado would emerge as the strongest economy in the country.
• U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman would finally lose an election, then bounce back to become  Aurora’s mayor.
• Jefferson and Arapahoe counties would be more reliably Democratic than Pueblo County in some elections.
• The incumbent president would stumble badly and complicate his re-election during a debate in Denver.

That’s Obama in ’12, not a forecast of Trump in ’20. I doubt Trump debates next year, because he prefers offense to defense.

In a decade, Colorado has elected its first gay and Jewish governor in Jared Polis, the first black person to Congress in Joe Neguse, put a Latina in the the House speaker’s chair in Crisanta Duran, elected the first black lesbian to the legislature in Rep. Leslie Herod in 2016 and its first transgender lawmaker in Rep. Brianna Titone in 2018.

Neither party has nominated a woman for governor or U.S. Senate. That’s progress for another decade, it appears.

In 2010 The Rocky Mountain News was dead, but print wasn’t. The Denver Post was budding into its Pulitzer prime, before its hedge fund owners did what they did in the back half of the decade.

Colorado Politics, Denverite and the Colorado Sun weren’t even around and ChalkBeat was called EdNews Colorado. Westword was and continues to be the go-to destination for news on life, pot and entertainment, and the Colorado Independent a decade ago started breaking away as a foundling of the Democratic Party, started with money from wealthy Democrats, including Polis.

Today, the Indy pokes at Polis and the Democrats as hard as anyone else. Today, reporters from a dozen or more outlets wait in line for desk space at the Capitol, because there are so many people doing news. Reasonable minds can differ whether more views flavor the broth or spoil the soup and whether the demise of local political news is real in Denver.

In 2010, John Hickenlooper was a big-city mayor looking to be governor, and now he’s his party’s senior statesman looking for one more knockout. This year he’s Rocky against Clubber Lang.

Back then, Cory Gardner was a young statehouse mover when he challenged and beat one-term Democrat Betsy Markey in the 4th Congressional District.

These days Gardner can’t find his words on Donald Trump, but back then The Denver Post referred to him as the “GOP Idea Man,” with a clear message on small government and lower taxes, a line TIME magazine repeated.

His candidacy was propelled by his leadership in creating the Colorado Clean Energy Authority, “which helped attract millions of green development dollars to the state; clean, renewable technology is a centerpiece of his campaign,” TIME wrote back then about a claim the left disputes with fury to this day, pointing out Gardner’s law is now defunct.

Michael Bennet was a big name in Democratic politics then and now. He was better than Republican Ken Buck on the ballot in 2010, when Bennet won his first term, after dispatching a primary opponent, Andrew Romanoff, the same nemesis in front of Hickenlooper this year.

There’s two ways of looking at this: The more things change, the more they stay the same, or if you walk in a circle you wind up where you started.