You can take the N or the R to 57^th St. Or, you can take the 1 or the 9 to Columbus Circle. You can walk from Penn Station, through the bleating lights of Times Square and up the westward kink of Broadway. You can see it from the corner of Broadway and 57^th, its stately flags and ruddy brick out of place amidst the taller skyscrapers, all glass and steel.

Some of us took cabs from hotels, or planes from other coasts, or wore out our walking shoes. Some of us took the subway, packed on a dreary weeknight full of Broadway-theater bound locals and late-stayers from those same skyscrapers, the women in walking shoes over their nylons.

You can’t book it like you’d book any other club. It is not a dusty standing-room basement full of huffy security guards in t-shirts and a bar selling cheap beer. It is not a check mark on an itinerary—the Beacon Theater with better acoustics and velvet on the seats. You must be asked. You must have a history, and a future.

It is so much more than just practice.

Fifteen minutes to showtime, and we were eating chocolate-dipped macaroons in a bakery on the corner with the calm assurance of those who hold front row tickets in their back pockets and too many years of concert-going experience under their belts.

What a blow to our senses was Hanson at Carnegie Hall, words we never expected to utter in anything but the most ironic jest. Then again, Hanson at Upstate Strip Mall was another thing we never thought we’d never live to see. There is a lesson there somewhere about clinging to too many Hanson-coated expectations: Hanson will never play Carnegie Hall. Hanson will never have another top-20 album. Taylor will never get married.

Our expectations were so disrupted by the Carnegie Hall concert that even the most set-in-stone Hanson concert standard—what to wear—was analyzed and re-analyzed as quickly as shirts, jewelry, and twanging hair elastics flew across the small expanse of my apartment hours before the show. Because what, after all, do you dress for? The venue? (Cocktail dress.) The band? (Low-slung jeans, whatever shows your boobs and your best expression of haughty disgust.) The weather? (Galoshes.)

We settled: What would Taylor do? To thine own teenie be true, but respect the venue and its luminous, formidable pedigree. Cleavage disappeared under a black blazer. Pretty earrings dressed up basic blue jeans. Sensible shoes for the rain and the sidewalks and rhinestones for the ghost of Leonard Bernstein.

When they walked on stage, Zac in chinos with a blue hooded sweatshirt peeking out from under his blazer, Taylor in some architecturally handsome designer jacket, only to reveal a t-shirt and jeans underneath, and Isaac in a sharply tailored navy suit, we knew we’d done it right.

It poured, of course. A frozen, pelting New York City rain that seems glittering and romantic only from the insides of well-heated buildings. We trudged through the gilt doors dripping and shivering, as the ushers, uniformed in oxblood and braid, waved us toward our seats. For girls who have become accustomed to every variety of small-time venue sleaze since the <I>This Time Around</I> tour—rude security, spilled drinks, low-watt lighting, and tinny sound systems alike—this was a new world.

By now, we have seen a respectable number of Hanson shows, the bunch of us. Before Carnegie Hall, we had never been able to legitimately claim the front row. We’ve come close. In 2000, we were in the fourth row at the Providence Civic Center when Hanson made one of their first live appearances since the Albertane tour, a breathless, heady night in which we all almost died of sun poisoning and where Taylor almost lost his lace-up suede pants during the final fevered moments of "In the City." The years, at least, have added some measure of dignity.

At Carnegie Hall, the view from the front row is not the view from the stage. It would take someone else to tell that story. A Hanson, maybe. But even on the floor, it was wonderful, and obvious. The feeling buzzed fiercely in the house, on every level, above our heads, even before they took the stage: Welcome to New York. Welcome to the big time. Welcome to your glittering, hard-won adulthood.

Just before the lights went down, Meghan touched my shoulder and said, "Look behind you." And for the first time, it felt real. It is tiered like a Martha Stewart wedding cake, elegant and symmetrical in beige and red velvet, one level and another and another, lit in rows like a necklace. And it was teeming with the smiling, overexcited oceans of us. A group of people who have probably never seen an orchestra play Beethoven live, who were raised on MTV and fruit roll-ups, who could not name you a single maestro off the tops of their ponytailed heads, who are young enough to be the grandchildren of Carnegie Hall’s average Wednesday night audience. It was one night. It was not history making, but Rome didn’t take a day, and even God needed seven.

And when they came out—a longer walk to their instruments than usual—nothing could have prepared me. For the shock of worlds colliding. For the shattering noise of the audience, amplified tenfold by the Hall’s famous acoustics, for the almost illogical amount of pride, as if it were my children up there. For the overwhelming feeling that, after this, nothing would be quite the same. Even the boys themselves looked a bit thunderstruck.

These are the same boys who, six years ago, probably would have found this drafty, musty hall with its stately balconies, quite grandmotherly and downright small compared with the outdoor arenas they were used to playing. You could see it in their faces, the understanding, finally, that handfuls of empty seats here were preferable to any sellout at the Hollywood Bowl.

And they sat down to play, and any sort of pretense vanished. It was Hanson. On a stage. Playing music. No different than any other night, in any other city.

Taylor told us over and over. You can scream. You can have a good time. You can dance. You can make all the noise you like. His message was clear: Let it go. The idea that your parents have let you borrow the car for the night, only with a sincere promise that you’ll bring it back in once piece.

The Audi, just like that Richard Tyler jacket, is yours, kid. You bought it with cash. Turn up the radio, roll the windows down and listen to Zac laughing hysterically in the back seat as you bring it up to 85.

It was the usual set list, played in the usual way. With all the warmth and affable good humor that we’ve come to expect from them. Charming, too, to hear an awestruck Taylor gush over how they felt so honored, using the word "amazing" no less than three times in a single sentence. They were out of their jackets by the fourth song, Taylor after the second.

And by the end, the lack of special guests, or rockstar stunts, or value-added schtick, was almost a relief. Who would you have wanted them to share the most accomplished moment of their careers with? Michele Branch?

Zac sang a song called "Tightrope," one of those shocking new-era Hanson songs that threatens to change the whole shape of their musical future in completely wonderful, unexpected ways. It is quiet, just Zac and a piano. The audience didn’t know how to act. Caught in the chasm between concert behavior and concert hall behavior, long moments of reverent silence were shot through with piercing screams. For that moment, our old selves didn’t reconcile so harmoniously with our new. But that, of course, is the charm of us, dear fellow fan.

It is Taylor Hanson telling a Carnegie Hall crowd to scream its lungs out. It is an audience, and a stage full of contradictions—Chuck Taylors and Armani, Crosby, Stills & Nash covers and "Mmmbop," crumbled ticket stubs, neatly printed Playbills with an artist bio, security guards in single breasted suits, pushing and shoving by the stage door, dancing in the aisles.

The next great generation? If you were at Carnegie Hall the night Hanson played, whether you were in the audience or on the stage, you looked it in the face.

And so Zac sang:

Will I go for it all and possibly fall
The tightrope is thin
But I could possibly win