The revelation that press secretary Sean Spicer does not like Dippin’ Dots’ claim to be “The Ice Cream of the Future” reminds me of my own encounters with the flash-frozen treat.

My earliest memory of eating Dippin’ Dots was in the 1980’s when I was about nine or ten-years-old. I was visiting Stone Mountain Park in Georgia, and I bought a cup of Dippin’ Dots from one of those pushcarts. It had a label that read, “Dippin’ Dots: Ice Cream of the Future.” I remember thinking That’s stupid. If you could bring back any technology from the future, why would you bring back ice cream?

I thought the slogan was so stupid that I didn’t really have any respect for Dippin’ Dots for decades.

In the late 2000’s I went to a baseball game in Rochester, New York. In the concession area, next to the pretzel and hot dog vendors, was a Dippin’ Dots kiosk. It was still using the same stupid slogan, “The Ice Cream of the Future.”

I thought I can’t believe they are still using that slogan after all the years.

Then it hit me. Dippin’ Dots ARE the ice cream of the future. They predicted it back in the 1980’s, because twenty years later we still had Dippin’ Dots. It’s like they saw into the future, looked at the ice cream sold at baseball games in 2007, and brought it back to 1987.

On that day in Stone Mountain Park in the 1980’s, I didn’t believe I would be eating twenty-first-century ice cream. But there I was, eating ice cream from the future. I just didn’t know it.