You never believe it will happen to you, being in a city during an attack. Until it actually does. A surreal mix of confusion, excitement, and fear pulses through your body. Sirens roar past. The main thought bouncing around inside your head: What the hell is going on?

In truth, after the Boston bombings, it  was impossible to tell what had actually happened until about an hour after the explosions. But something went awry, with gossip and rumor quickly spreading from group to group, building to building.

San Francisco saw its version of the Boston Marathon on Sunday, May 19, when more than 30,000 runners and casual walkers took to the streets in the 12-kilometer Bay to Breakers. Despite a heightened police presence, participants didn’t seem to be too worried about a similar tragedy here.

“That happened there,” said Nancy Tucker of Orange Country, interviewed by Legend reporter Jacob Winick. “But that doesn’t mean that every place you go is going to have that kind of issue.”

A man fully dressed in a pirate suit, who referred to himself as Captain Jack, told Winick that the attack in Boston was an “isolated event” perpetrated by “idiots.” He was also quick to note that “San Francisco has normal people.”

We had a decision to make, as a city and as a country, in how we responded to an event as horrific as the one in Boston. At first glance, as more information came out and various media sources responded to it, it seemed as though the Boston bombings were going to forever change our relationship to citywide parades and events. It seemed that no city would be able to embrace the excitement of a Boston Marathon or a Bay to Breakers. Instead of family, friends, and revelers lining the race path, armed policemen with watchful eyes and assault rifles would be the only souls cheering runners on.

This scene, which seems straight out of Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany, could have become our reality. But it didn’t. We could have given into the fear radiating from the hundreds of assumptions and falsehoods proposed by various news agencies, such as the Washington Post’s report that authorities had taken a Saudi national into custody as a suspect, and another report, made by multiple sources, claiming that Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student who had gone missing a day before the bombings, was responsible for the attack.

But we didn’t concede. We rallied and reveled. And we applaud this, because it means that our desire for joy and community pride is stronger than the culture of fear that has dominated our relationship to terrorism for the past decade.

At this year’s Bay to Breakers, there were 23 arrests and one fatality — a person who fell off the roof of his house after a party.

That was tragic, but as Boston showed us, we were lucky. It could have been so much worse.

—Writer David Immerman was in Boston on May 19, the day of the bombings.

This editorial represents the consensus of the Legend staff.