It was on the twenty-seventh day of September, in the year of our Icculus nineteen hundreds plus eighty-five, that a perhaps immodest assembly gathered within the walls of the mostly modest Slade Hall, to hear a fledgling group of young musicians test their strength against the demands of live performance. They were not yet today's veterans of summer amphitheaters and storied New Year’s runs, evolved and tested (though not hardened) by the rigors of touring, but were but mere apprentices in the craft of improvisation. There, amid murmurs of anticipation and the creaking of floorboards, the lamps glowing with modest wattage, the instruments piped through relatively stark effects, the band struck forth a tune that would prove, in time, to be among their most enduring: "Possum".

The number was not, by outward description, of any grand pretension. Its theme, concerning as it did the untimely, flattened fate of a humble marsupial upon the roadway, might in other hands have been dismissed as trifling or grotesque. But Phish seized upon the simplicity, of both roadkill and rock, as though it were a secret key to greater realms. And, indeed, it was. In its earliest renditions, the tune was brisk, almost fleeting, scarcely five minutes in length. Yet, from that unassuming seed of song, there grew, over the course of two score years, a mighty beast of resurrected energy, with performances eventually stretching, flowering, and contorting into something far larger than the sum of its nominal parts.

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