Though footwear and shoes will be the main focus of Popdiatry, I’ll occasionally write about other wearable gear in a feature called “Off The Path”.

For this first journey off the path, we’ll rewind about 14 years to when Y2K was a thing. The year 2000 problem had people stockpiling water and canned goods in preparation for societal collapse because the world’s computers didn’t have a four-digit data field to reflect post “2000”.

Out of that non-event came the opportunistic Club Millennium, who released a line of adjustable baseball hats sporting the Club Millenium “MM” logo, or simply “Y2K”.

As the world and its tech peacefully transferred from 99 to 00, many of these hats began their journey to oddball discount stores like Building #19 in New England, where my bro picked up a couple circa 2006. Building #19 was incidentally a good place to stumble upon shoes and sneakers from yesteryear. I recall seeing long dead-stock models by Puma and Adidas (including RUN DMC Adidas) on their shelves long after those models were off the market. Building #19 was known as well for their humorous advertising, with weekly circulars illustrated by a comic artist going along with their “good stuff cheap” corporate motto.