For a kid, it was paradise by the lake, contained under a big orange awning. There were huge fast zip lines, and climbing ropes; webs of netting arching up at various heights and monkey bars suspended over a pool of water. There were mazes of rickety bridges to navigate and towers constructed of tarps to scale and shiny steel slides to speed down. There was a forest of punching bags you could run through, elbows up, to bump and stagger and get bumped. There were swinging padded walls and swinging suspended tubes and padded vinyl floors to absorb your falls. Things you could pull to make loud thumping noise, things you could pump to shoot fountains of water, nooks and crannies you could hide in. A huge giant air mattress to bounce on.

A playground, a friend mentioned recently, that provoked a nervous feeling in your belly — the thrill of mild recklessness that accompanied a rush of freedom.

It was a kid’s dream, and it would be easy enough for many of us today to think possibly it only ever existed in our dreams. How could any real playground live up to those memories?

But there it is — all researched and historicized and romanticized in documentary detail in a piece by writer Nicholas Hune-Brown in the online publication the Local: the Ontario Place Children’s Village of the 1970s and 1980s. And there it is, in the middle of that piece (and now on this page): a picture of me in 1980-something roughhousing in the thicket of punching bags. At least, I’m pretty sure it’s me. That is my adolescent face, and my two-tone T-shirt, my red-striped white socks and pale, skinny bare legs poking out of short-shorts. My mother agrees that it appears to be me.

But if it isn’t, it could have been: this place was real, and children of my generation had it to romp in. And we did.

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“What would I, as a child, like to do,” the playground’s designer, Eric McMillan, told Hune-Brown. And that philosophy turned into a park that featured things lots of children did like to do. As the Local piece goes on to say, McMillan turned into a bit of an international playground-design superstar for a moment there.

I won’t rehash Hune-Brown’s whole wonderful piece — I’ll just recommend you read it, to revel in the memories if you are lucky enough to have been there, or marvel at what was if you weren’t. When it was published last week, it inspired a wave of happy memories on social media that — like my introduction above, expressing both remembered joy and some level of astonishment that this place could ever have been real.

Part of this is just pure sentimental nostalgia, obviously. Those good old days sure were good, weren’t they! They don’t make ’em like they used to!

But they really don’t make ’em like that anymore, and maybe we should, so our own kids can have good old days as fun as those ones. Maybe, with modern fears about safety and hyper-programming of kids’ activities, something like that just doesn’t fit in today’s world.

But there’s also a bit of mournfulness that comes because Ontario Place is currently in a long-suspended state of redevelopment planning. And most of us can feel fairly certain that whatever they build down there won’t be half as good as what we had back then.

“What would I, as a child, like to do.” You could do worse as a starting point for planning a playground, and our provincial and city officials could do worse than adopting a similar philosophy. Leave the developers and lobbyists and various other self-interested hucksters outside for a while — heck, even put aside practical concerns to start the brainstorming process — and ask, “what would we, as residents, like to do.” Then begin adapting that wish into practical reality.

It’s a dream, I know. Like something conjured from a child’s idealized memories. But strolling down Children’s Village memory lane shows that at least occasionally, it’s a kind of dream that has at least sometimes been made into reality.