I was sitting at the bar at Le Depot with my friends Jacqui and Simon when I noticed the 20-something bartender pouring a pale, pink drink into a chilled martini glass. Sigh. A Cosmopolitan.

Considering how everything ’90s is new again, I’m not surprised the sweet-tart cocktail has made a comeback. And while the mixologist with the fabulous curly bangs at Le Depot may know how to properly shake and finely strain one into an icy glass, I couldn’t help but wonder: does she even have a clue about the Cosmo’s place in the pantheon of pop culture?

Flashback to “Sex and the City,” Season 1, Episode 7, “The Monogamists,” which aired in July 1998. Cue the classic Carrie Bradshaw interior monologue. “That afternoon, I dragged my poor, tortured soul out to lunch with Stanford Blatch and attempted to stun it senseless with Cosmopolitans.” From there, the Cosmo became the go-to cocktail order for my friends and me.

On vacation at a posh resort in Palm Springs with my best friend and our husbands, I actually had to explain to the clueless barman how to make one. Miranda would’ve rolled her eyes and ordered a scotch. I, on the other hand, turned the moment into a Cosmo master class: Absolut Citron, triple sec, Rose’s Lime and the faintest blush of cranberry juice with a spritz of lemon.

And just like that, I was Carrie Bradshaw at the Tastee-Freez drive-thru in New Jersey: Um, helloooo, I’d like a cheeseburger, please, a large fries and a Cosmopolitan. If you know, you know.

As much as Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte may have made them iconic, they didn’t invent the Cosmo. The pink drink is said to have come about much earlier. Some say it originated in the gay bars of San Francisco in the late ’70s. It was eventually finessed and popularized at NYC’s legendary Odeon, where bartender Toby Cecchini is said to have served the cocktail to Madonna — and even to Sarah Jessica Parker herself — in the late ’80s.

Cut to my own Cosmopolitan moment: a girls’ trip in the late ’90s, shortly after the famed Soho Grand opened in Lower Manhattan. It was the kind of Charlotte-approved weekend we dreamed about. False-eyelash applications at the MAC counter. Cigars in the Bubble Lounge in Tribeca. Trying on Fendi baguettes at Barneys. I even spotted SJP herself at an ATM on West Broadway. For the moment, we were stars just like her instead of married suburbanites with early flights.

I recently binged “Sex and the City” from start to finish, amazed at how much of it still holds up for me. The vocal-fried, Gen Z “get-ready-with-me” girlies watching it today may consider this relic from the late 1900s as cringey, misogynistic and annoying AF, albeit with an enviable amount of indoor smoking. But for me, the stories of four super-stylish gal pals living in New York still resonate. Not so much because of all the sex in the city, but because they were smart, hilarious, fierce and utterly flawed — just like me and my friends. They brought both the sweet and the tart.

In the end, it wasn’t so much about the power of the big O but the power of the GNO—and strong female friendships.

Years later, I find myself single and living not in New York City, but Park City. Where there are Rad Power Bikes instead of yellow cabs. Mountains instead of skyscrapers. Hokas instead of Manolos. I like my money where I can see it: hanging in my gear room. But still, I can’t help but feel a little bit Carrie, especially with my own Stanford Blatches stunning me senseless with shakers of Cosmos at 8,000 feet in the hot tub at the Beehive.

One of those friends called to tell me about the minor earthquake that occurred at 12 a.m. the night before. Were you awake? he wondered. He felt the shutters of his condo rattling like Samantha Jones having a three-way with a couple of personal trainers. We can rebuild, he quipped. We’re a strong community. We’ll get through this together.

I laughed.

Maybe the past is like an anchor holding us back, as Carrie mused. Or maybe it’s an earthquake — shaking us out of a dead sleep, rattling our shuttered selves — the ones we’ve so carefully rebuilt. I don’t know. I’ll need a Cosmo to mull it over. Sometimes life just needs the right shake to bring everything into perfect balance.