Don’t get me wrong; he’s done a lot of not-Doogie Howser things that I really love, though I’ve never watched How I Met Your Mother. And I will never stop resenting that Great Performances didn’t record and air the Broadway revival of Assassins where he played Lee Harvey Oswald, because it sounds like exactly the sort of thing that I want to watch over and over again. Okay, I never got into How I Met Your Mother, but I keep thinking how amazing his career would be if we had big-budget musicals as something common again. Though I’m sure he’s happy with the career he has now.

He’s three years older than I am, which I have to admit makes me feel a bit ancient when I see pictures from the first few seasons of Doogie Howser, MD. It was 1989. He was sixteen. And he looks like a baby. He doesn’t look sixteen; he looks far younger. A little of his career predated the show, but mostly, he came to our attention playing a teenage doctor. Unusually for TV, he was actually the same age as his character; his neighbour, Vinnie, was played by Max Casella—22 at the time. I remember watching a bit of the show, enough to remember the basic structure, but I didn’t watch it a lot.

But honestly, everyone who was old enough to watch it is familiar with the basic structure. Some years ago, he was on the final round of a season of Celebrity Poker Showdown, and Kevin Nealon and Matthew Perry made him do the “typing a diary essay” thing from the end of every episode, including the pause before the last line. Because man, that show ran on rails sometimes. It’s quite clear that it was at the heart of the “learn a valuable lesson” era of programming. Everything Doogie went through taught him a lesson that he then wrote about in his journal. It was a routine, and it’s one we knew very well.

And then the show went off the air, and he did other things. Starship Troopers, where I’ve referred to his character for years as “Nazi Stormtrooper Doogie.” For a very long time, everything he did, I still thought of him a little as Doogie Howser. Maybe part of me still does. But I think it was seeing the raw emotion in his portrayal of Doctor Horrible that let me move beyond that myself. And honestly, seeing that they had to figure out how to write songs to take advantage of his incredible voice and range while not having him overshadow Felicia Day. Which is its own kind of impressive.

And, of course, no one does Halloween like Harris and his husband, David Burtka, and their kids. And the kids are old enough now that I feel like they’re actually going along with it. As a parent, you only have so many years of making your kids do what you want them to before they either go along or rebel. And while you can fake smiles, you can’t fake the pure joy those kids are clearly taking in the playing along. Those kids have lots of great choices, and they choose to go along with their dads on making Halloween brighter for all of us.

Just because Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka could get married doesn’t mean the struggle is over. Keep fighting.