The other day, I found an artifact in my dresser drawer under a pair of mercifully underutilized jodhpurs and the glow-in-the-dark "survival briefs" my grandmother gave me for Y2K. The object was mashed, flattened, and bristling with cotton dingleberries, but it was, unmistakably, a Strong Bad knit cap. There he was, vividly stitched, a balloony 'toon in a candy-apple-red Mexican wrestler mask: the de facto star of Homestar Runner. Remember Homestar, that Flash-animated Web series from those halcyon pre-YouTube days when Web series were the Future, videos stayed put on their sites of origin, and we all had to walk a mile in the snow to find a data jack? I hadn't visited since 2005 — a billion lifetimes ago in meme years — and, frankly, I assumed Homestar had run its last lap. Imagine my surprise, then, to find the site alive and well and celebrating its 10th (!) anniversary. Ten years! Heck, Cheers only lasted 11. 'Twas then I realized, with equal parts horror and delight: The Web and I are both old enough to have our own Cheers. Homestar Runner was — and still is — where everybody knows my screen name (ScottluvsAOL69 ... clearly, not everything ages well).

Now, getting nostalgic for a fin de Netscape time-waster is a new and disturbing sensation for me: Web content is designed to dissolve in your brain like dopamine Certs. Yet my Homestar bar stool still feels warm: Firing up the old URL, knit cap in hand, I'm suddenly back in the early Aughts, watching Strong Bad answer his email, kick the Cheat, his rhomboid accomplice, and dream up such memorable mini-memes as the majestic dragon Trogdor the Burninator — a Trapper Keeper-quality pencil doodle with a catchy metal theme song. (It ended up name-checked in the Buffy finale and eventually landed in Guitar Hero II.)

Sure, Homestar is well past its prime; its creators, the Atlanta-based brother act Matt and Mike Chapman, say the peak came around 2005, just as YouTube and embeddable, user-uploaded video began re-terraforming the media landscape. But viewership is still steady, and the ad-free site remains profitable, supported by T-shirts and assorted Home schwag. (Merch is probably the best indicator of a property's real-world health.)

Strong Bad & Co. have always existed in their own little universe, unbeholden to #trendingtopics.And that might explain why they're still around. By design (or lack thereof), Homestar has remained a fixed point in a roiling video maelstrom. It succeeds outside of time, chrono-stationary, like Deloreans, or Walt Disney's frozen head.

The Homestar mythos, to the extent that it is referential at all, is cobbled together from safely dated curios like late-'80s hair metal and 8-bit videogames. Like Cheers, Monty Python, Seinfeld, and other cherished old-media amaranths that live on in fan affection, Homestar grows its own culture instead of simply riding the jet stream. Ninja crazes come and go, and everybody tries to ape South Park and Adult Swim — but Homestar, despite superficial similarities, never really chased that dragon. It drew its own. It even has its own holidays (Decemberween) and ersatz hip-hop slang ("all-up-ons").

I think Homestar presages a new webstalgia: I may never find myself getting misty over the Dancing Banana, but Get Your War On? All your Web touchstones are belong to us. I fully expect to get a little teary someday when we start playing Hot Or Not over warm Jell-O at the Robot-Assisted Living Facility for Retired Singulatarians. With any luck, I'll be taking my grandchildren on visits to HomeStarRunner.com. "Kids," I'll say, "this is what I was spending my time watching back in the day." "You mean, while you weren't fixing the climate catastrophe?" they'll ask. "Hush," I'll say, "and put your respirators back on. Strong Bad's got a hilarious old-skool rap coming up, and you're gonna need extra oxygen for the belly laugh."

Email scott_brown@wired.com.