When I was young, my mother used to take me into the voting booth with her. We would go to the local elementary school — it was always strange to see grown-ups in the gym — and she would lift me up and help me pull the big lever that would close the curtain behind us with a loud schwack. Then, she would tell me ("Be very careful ...") which of the little levers to push down, and thus I voted, as a surrogate, for two presidential candidates, several congressmen, and a handful of local officials.

I remember feeling excited and privileged to be entrusted with such a secret task, and longing for the day when I would be able to go behind the curtain myself. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her companions are instructed to "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain"; the opposite was true here. Even as a child, I understood that people paid a lot of attention to what went on back there.

On Tuesday, I voted in my first presidential election. At the Dilboy VFW Hall, in Somerville, there was no curtain, and there were no levers. Instead, I was handed a large sheet of paper and a marker to indicate my preference, and escorted to corrals with dividers that offered a little less privacy and much less mystery than the traditional voting booth.

When I arrived at 8 a.m., the line of people waiting to vote was already out the door. People smiled as they emerged from the voting room — it might have been simply because they were done waiting, but I prefer to think it was because they felt like engaged citizens.

When it was my turn, I used my marker to draw a path that connected an arrow to a line next to my candidate. An electronic machine consumed my ballot and I was done. It wasn’t quite the same as voting in Roaring Brook Elementary School. But a feeling of power and responsibility — similar to the one I used to feel, but different because it was all my own — suffused me.

Studies show that because I voted in my first presidential election, it’s likely that I’ll become a "habitual voter." That’s a pretty safe prediction, but let’s hope it holds true for the hundreds of thousands of other people my age, whose political power has been endlessly extolled during this campaign, and whose intellectual coming-of-age occurred at such a historic time.

Like me, they might have only fuzzy recollections of the 2000 election. My one vivid memory isn’t even that colorful — it’s of sitting on my bed in my dorm room overlooking the Charles River, watching TV. On November 7, 2000, I was 17 years old, two months into my college career, and still too young to vote. All I can picture that day are the reds and blues of the newscasts that left more than 50 million Al Gore supporters with four years of bitterness. I admit that back then, I didn’t grasp the magnitude of a contested presidential election.

But since 2000, my college classmates and I experienced the horror of September 11. We’ve judged the merits (or lack thereof) of going to war in Iraq; we’ve witnessed the joy and bigotry of the gay-marriage debate here in Massachusetts; most of us have graduated into the real world of taxes and jobs and health plans and the economy. Something tells me that this time around, I’ll remember a little more than colors on TV. And it looks like I’m not alone. One Harvard study predicted that more than 50 percent of college students would vote in 2004; both the Democratic and Republican Parties have reported jumps in registration for 18-to-24-year-olds. While exit polling indicates that those expectations may have been overblown, the fact remains that young people have reasons to pay close attention this time around — and lots of them are doing so.

In their endorsement of John Kerry, the editors of the New Yorker wrote, "[A] sad and ironic consequence of this war is that its fumbling prosecution has undermined its only even arguably meritorious rationale [altruism] — and as a further consequence, the salience of idealism in American foreign policy has been likewise undermined."

I fear that another contested election, or one that leaves young people feeling like our voices in the voting booth have gone unheard, would mean a similar loss of idealism in the realm of voting. That would be unfortunate. Because for all of us who are for the first time putting our weight behind a presidential hopeful — whether we are taking pens to paper or punching holes in ballots or pushing levers behind curtains — there’s still a shine of exclusivity. We still feel like we’re breaking into a grown-up world.