The guy with the 1970s mustache and fringe of white hair warns us in an ad for Progressive Insurance not to grow up to be our parents. The apple should fall far from the tree, to put it another way.

We of a certain age worry and talk a lot about the young people coming up. Some of that worry involves whether young folks will be like us or will become people we don’t even recognize.

Let’s focus on Generation Z, people born from 1996 through 2012. Three events in the past nine days brought them to mind, and two of them put to rest some of my uneasiness about what the world will look like after folks my age have left.

The first, nine days ago in Portland, involved tall young women in short pants running up and down a hardwood floor. It was a basketball game between the University of Maine and the University of Indiana. It was a really big deal, even if you don’t follow sports.

First, the bigness of it. The crowd of 5,983 was the largest ever to see a women’s basketball game in Maine. And Indiana’s star, Mackenzie Holmes, graduated from Gorham High School, 10 miles from the Cross Insurance Arena. Holmes at 6-foot-3 was the biggest person on the court.

While I like Maine kids to play sports at Orono or one of the 13 other Maine colleges with athletics programs, Holmes is a special case. Had she attended UMaine, she would have raised an already strong program several pegs, as Cindy Blodgett did in 1994 when she chose Orono.

But Holmes chose what is called a Power Five school — those are schools in the five strongest athletic conferences — and helped raise IU from also-rans into Big 10 Conference champions.

Anyone at the Cross Arena on Nov. 30 had to recognize the importance and the glamor of the night. Everywhere was red Hoosier gear and blue Maine gear. The Press Herald sportswriter got it wrong when he said the crowd showed more IU red than Maine blue.

He also failed to note how many people, including what must have been hundreds of young girls, were cheering for both Mackenzie Holmes and the Maine Black Bears. Chances are good that the next Mackenzie Holmes or Cindy Blodgett was among them.

Holmes and her teammates stand as role models for young people, especially girls. A composed Holmes grasped that and spoke of having been a little girl attending basketball games, dreaming of playing in the big time. She spoke, too, of the value of putting back in for those coming up. She has made it, and her message was that others can, too. And she seems happy to be a model.

The second event was the annual Christmas concert last week at Luther College. I have attended the concert five times, but this year, I livestreamed it. Enraptured for 110 minutes.

Luther College is a liberal arts college in Decorah, Iowa, a town that celebrates Norwegian-American culture. Decorah, named for a Ho-Chunk indigenous leader, holds a Nordic Fest every summer, and the Vesterheim Museum portrays Norwegian-American life in the 19th century.

When my late wife and I attended our first Christmas at Luther, in 2013, the six choirs, full orchestra, bell choir and readers totaled about 500 of the 2,400 students on campus. Many are music and music-education majors. But enrollment has fallen to 1,600, an experience shared with many liberal arts and other colleges.

That means, the elite group of private-college grads who will someday run the system is ever narrowing.

Christmas at Luther can be my most meaningful worship of the year. Even on the small screen, the performance by 300 or so student musicians inspires one’s faith in the generation coming up.

That said, I recognize that top-tier athletes and top-tier musicians are elites, likely to succeed after college. Still, it’s comforting to know the leaders of the future are in place and preparing.

The system works for these young folks, and I’m sure that in their hands it will keep working.

But what of the 63% of young people who don’t go to college? Or the 87% of college kids who are in public schools that range from great universities to small campuses with limited resources?

Or who never make it through high school?

The third event that struck me was the story in The New Yorker of Kip Kinkel, who in 1998 was among the first school shooters. After killing his parents in Springfield, Oregon, he shot 25 fellow students with a semi-automatic rifle in the cafeteria, killing two. He was 15 years old.

Classmates had called him “strange and morbid.” He had been suspended for having a stolen pistol in his locker at school. He had seen a psychiatrist and had been put on medications for depression, but he stopped taking the meds.

The kids who played basketball in Portland and the kids who sang and played instruments in Decorah thrive. But we are failing millions, literally, of others.

How many more Kip Kinkels are out there undiagnosed and/or untreated?

Bob Neal recalls a fellow director on the Mount Blue School Board saying we serve the “top” and the “bottom” students well, but ignore those in the middle. We need to meet the middle, too. Neal can be reached at [email protected].