You step away to follow other career interests, reconnect with old friends 25 years later and ... boom ... things really changed.  Over this discontinuity, the profession truly busted out of universities and museums for opportunities in consultancies, government, and NGOs.  Prospective practitioners don’t see archaeology as “the gateway drug” to the hard sciences anymore.  A new generation is leaning into societal relevance and agency, focusing on partnerships, progressive reforms, decolonization, advancing indigenization and responding to the heavy responsibilities of helping investigate the missing children.  More subjectively constructed, humanistic narratives are populating the archaeological record.  Challenges to the trope of humanity’s ineluctable march to inequity and constraint, along with case studies with lessons for the Anthropocene, are having their moment.  All to the good.  But there’s been scant progress on some vital legacy problems.   Peak archaeology has surely passed.   Resource loss far exceeds meaningful conservation, and no oversight or governance exists to measure, much less mitigate this.  And where are the communicators effectively amplifying archaeology’s value in the public square?  Like Jack Brink.  The discipline needs to level up or risk reverting to a small, precarious enterprise, ill-equipped to face climate change, relentless development, fierce competition for funding, and indifference.