You still get to spend a whole lot more time on the experience later in life, trying to justify all the mistakes, explain all the falsehoods in it, reinterpreting it to suit your current mood, filing down the edges so it fits into your current map of your life, and the way the world works, and all that. You usually forget the really great parts of it - at least as far as concrete examples go, anyway - there remains a nebulous, epehemeral haze over the whole of the milestone that tries to keep you from remembering it quite right.
You know what the weirdest part of this is? I got started on this whole random train of thought because I saw the word "fulcrum" in a book.