A stack of Nintendo Switch 2 devices is restocked on Thursday at the Nintendo store in New York’s Rockefeller Center. The Associated Press

If you were lucky enough to be able to pick up a Nintendo Switch 2 this weekend from your retailer of choice, well, the odds are good you probably aren’t reading this, and it would be hard to blame you.

It’s been eight long years and change since the gaming giant from Japan released a new gaming system, and with the weekend and summertime now in full swing, for kids and kids at heart, it really does seem like the perfect time to kick back on the couch and enjoy the latest adventures from Mario and the gang.

For everyone but me, that is.

Trust me, it’s not like I didn’t want to be there right there alongside you on launch day. Every fiber of my being wanted to just have the $500-plus it would have cost me to pick up the system and likely a copy of “Mario Kart World.” Believe me, the desire was always there.

As you get older, as many readers of our newspaper will tell you, life just sort of gets in the way of those things you want to do. Yes, I’m only 33 and you’re probably reading this gritting your teeth through your morning coffee, but you know I’m right.

It just so happens that I’m a child at heart and the thing I want to do is sit in front of my TV and go on an adventure or two. It sounds a lot more doable than trying to ride a wheelie on a child’s bicycle (shout out to Dad) or learning a new sport (shout out to my youngest brother) or trying to put together a beat up ’90s model Jeep (shout out to the other brother).

But coming back to that previous point, I just don’t have a disposable $500 dollars to blow on a game system that, aside from the handful of new titles that came at launch and the new “Donkey Kong Bananza” coming next month, doesn’t have a lot there right now that I haven’t already played or have no interest in picking up.

Even without kids or a car payment, to justify doing that at my age is also saying, “OK, well I won’t be going on any other trips the rest of the year, or anything else fun that might come up.”

It really is funny sitting here as I type all of this out, because I keep hearing the words of my mother ringing in my head anytime I ever asked for a new game or anything that might stretch into the already-thin family budget.

It would almost always fall to one of three times — Christmas, my birthday (April 5) or Easter, which usually fell either immediately before or after said birthday.

And it always came with that famous caveat that all these years later thinking about it still makes me cringe, “Well, Daniel, that’ll be your birthday present then.”

You don’t appreciate it when you’re younger, but those lessons do end up coming back around, but not always in the ways you would expect.

On a recent work night several weeks ago, fellow Mirror staffer Michael Boytim, who was about my age when I first started here about the same time the first Nintendo Switch came out, said something that had left me pondering this very column.

“I’m probably not getting the new Switch,” Mike said one night during small talk. “I think I’m just getting the point where I just want to enjoy playing the older games more than trying to keep up with the newer stuff.”

That’s stuck with me all this time because, unfortunately, I think I’m getting to the point, even at just 33, where I’m reaching the age where I don’t care as much any more when these kinds of weekends come up on the calendar.

As I’ve wrote about before, I stood in line outside of the Logan Town Center Best Buy for several hours on a chilly March launch night in 2017 for the midnight release of Nintendo’s last system.

“The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” was and still is regarded as a turning point for the Zelda franchise and served as a launching pad for the past eight years of the company’s growth and success.

And I’ve very much enjoyed my time with the Nintendo Switch. But I have tons of games sitting in a backlog going back 10-plus years that needs to be played.

The Switch 2 will still be there when I can get to it.

Mirror copy editor Dan Isenberg can be reached at disenberg@altoonamirror.com or on X @TheseDanTweets