The Y-sky-is-falling predictions mirrored Hanna Rosin’s thesis in “The End of Men,” showing that women are consolidating power — as graduates, breadwinners, single mothers, consumers.

Indeed, former Clinton money guy Terry McAuliffe would not be the new governor of Virginia if his Republican opponent, Ken Cuccinelli, had not scared off single women by belonging to a state party crew that was chasing women around with wands, trying to do transvaginal probes.

Even back when I first talked to Dr. Page — known as Mr. Y — he cast himself as “the defender of the rotting Y chromosome.”

He painted a picture of the Y as “a slovenly beast,” sitting in his worn armchair, surrounded by boxes and pizza crusts.

“The Y wants to maintain himself but doesn’t know how,” he said. “He’s falling apart, like the guy who can’t manage to get a doctor’s appointment or clean up the house or apartment unless his wife or girlfriend does it.”

But, as it turned out, it was a mistake to underestimate a chromosome that had for centuries madly attacked, annexed, enslaved, pillaged, plundered, inseminated and thrust forward to create great art, architecture and literature.

Driven no doubt by lust and ego, the Y heroically revived.

“The Y chromosome did essentially fall asleep at the wheel about 200 to 300 million years ago, not long after we parted evolutionary company with birds, while we were still pretty close to our reptilian ancestors,” Dr. Page tells me now. “And then, at the last minute before the car veered off the cliff, the Y chromosome woke up and got with the program and said, ‘I don’t have a lot left, but what I have left I’m going to keep.’”