About 40 years ago in a basement not that far away... In the early 1980's, in junior high (before we called it middle school) I played AD&D with my friends. If you're picturing the guys from Stranger Things, that was pretty much it. Wood paneled basement, lots of soda, nerd-bonding. I ended up being the DM a fair amount of time working off the 1978 and 1979 editions of the DM's Guide, Player's Manual and Monster Manual. Everything back then was pencil and paper. Played some off and on through high school and a little bit in college. Sometime in my 20's during law school I must have needed cash and sold the books off at a used bookstore thinking D&D was now only a nostalgic feature of my 80's teen experiences.
Fast forward a bunch of years and I'm a divorced dad of two teenagers. They have older cousins who are big gamers who have introduced them to a bunch of different board games, video games, etc. Sometime in 2018, one of them got my son a D&D box set and he got interested. His older sister also wanted to try out the game. I jumped into the game with them and their two cousins. We got part way through a campaign last year (Sunless Citadel) before my daughter went off to college. Started up a new one this spring (Tomb of Annihilation) when she came back during COVID.
What I've learned is that the game is still in my blood. I've picked up on the 5e version and have used roll20 and discord enough to be fairly familiar with the tech and like how much it simplifies things. I don't take myself or the game too seriously, but I have a lot of time on my hands these days. One of my other hobbies is writing (working on a novel) so I enjoy character building and role play, exploring, problem solving, the thrill of combat, and, being sort of old school, I prefer to live and die by the roll of the die.
I'd be interested in joining some like-minded people for an on-going campaign. Eventually, I'd like to brush up on the rules enough to maybe DM again.