By Sana Sareshwala

As seniors graduate high school and head off to their future endeavors, they won’t be returning with Harry Potter on the Hogwarts Express in the fall.

Seniors were in third grade, just beginning to learn how to read chapter books, and old enough to comprehend the series, when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone movie released.

The eighth and final Harry Potter movie, which will be released on July 15, will be the last hurrah for a generation that grew up with the series.

The graduating class of 2011 represents the Harry Potter Generation, a group of kids who impatiently waited for the release of the books and films associated with the series, all the while analyzing the novels and searching for hints from the series’ author.

The hype for Harry Potter outlasted any other series of our generation. Fads like the Twilight Saga came and vanished, but the craze for Harry Potter never truly left.

As a die-hard Potter fan, I read each book in the series doexns of sites, listened to weekly podcasts analyzing the novels, and made every midnight release of a movie.

For me, and many of my peers, this July marks not only the end of the Harry Potter series, but also the end of the Potter midnight premieres and riveting comparison between the books and the movies.

In other words, its the end of my childhood. And although the book series ended four years ago, the last movie is the final stretch of this series.

We grew up watching Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson make their opening appearance of every movie, looking a little bit older than the previous movie, and we would cheer from the seats of the movie theater at the midnight premiere, hopelessly adoring Ron and his fear of spiders.

Harry Potter became more than just a book series; it became a topic of discussion at the dinner table, a conversational topic that bridged the gap between two strangers.

Harry Potter proved to be a fantasy world that connected all types of people from the secular world.

We are the generation that endlessly debated whether   Harry and Hermione or Hermione and Ron  would end up as a couple. We are the generation that cried over Dumbledore’s and Sirius’s death. We are the generation that said “I told you so!” after we found out that Severus Snape was innocent. We are the Harry Potter generation.