While it's often fashionable to dwell upon what might have been, what's usually overlooked, is that really and truly, it couldn't have.

Because, invariably, any romanticized versions of how things "might have been," are based upon fictionalized versions of the past.

You see, darlings, most of the time when people think the present could have been different than it is, it's because they think the past was different than it was. Happily, the future can still be anything.