I don’t know about you, but I thought 22-year-old poet Amanda Gorman stole the show at the Presidential Inauguration this week with her electric recital of “The Hill We Climb.”

She amassed nearly 900,000 Twitter followers over the course of the day, and I think it’s because she gave the country a new story to tell itself, a fresh idea of who we might be. 

“And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us,” said our first national youth poet laureate.

“To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.”

She included her presence on the stage as a part of that new narrative: “… in a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president.”

The clearing of the way for that “dream” may be the biggest thing that happened this week.

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The juxtaposition of Gorman’s words and Kamala Harris’ swearing in as the first female vice president, the highest office ever held by a woman in America, filled me with some hope for our daughters and granddaughters.

Gorman is about the same age as my daughter, and this week I realized that, for the first time, us fathers of daughters can now tell our girls with some degree of honesty that anything is possible, the sky’s the limit. A woman can be a vice president, and that means she can be a president, too.

Historians say the “power of the mirror” is enormous. What young people see, they believe they can become. Women have long since broken glass ceilings in other areas, such as business and sports and the arts, but Washington, D.C., is America’s court, where we all look for our idealized versions of American men and women, our own princes and princesses, kings and queens. The White House is the last unbroken marble ceiling in America.

Larry Sabato, founder and director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, once told me an anecdote that had stayed with him from the years he lived in Great Britain as a young man. Margaret Thatcher was stepping down after serving as prime minister for 12 years. During her tenure, the constitutional monarch was also a woman, Queen Elizabeth II. When Thatcher retired and John Major succeeded her, a young girl was interviewed about the changing of the guard, and she seemed startled, saying, “I thought that only women could serve as leader here.”

“Role models are exceptionally important in politics,” said Sabato. “As a teacher, I see that all the time.”

My Washington women friends remind me that this moment has been a long time coming. Why in the world, they ask, did it take us more than two centuries to lift a woman up into the executive branch?

When Geraldine Ferraro ran on the ticket with Walter Mondale back in 1984 as the first female vice presidential candidate, the sexism was blatant and unapologetic. “It was so sexist, it was stuff like she has beautiful legs, she has nicer legs than her opponent. I want to see her in a wet T-shirt contest with her opponent,” said Marie Wilson, founder of The White House Project, a decades-long campaign to increase female representation in American institutions, businesses, and government. “People said all that kind of stuff because it was OK.”

Pat Schroeder, the first woman Colorado ever sent to Congress, briefly explored a run for president back in 1987 because she thought Ferraro had laid the groundwork for women to seek the highest offices in the land.

“Geraldine Ferraro, when she was running as vice president with Mondale, I thought everyone had gotten so comfortable with that,” Schroeder told Colorado Public Radio. “Then, when I looked at it and I started traveling around the country and I realized how many parts of the country hadn’t elected a woman to really anything, they certainly weren’t going to consider a woman for president.”

When Schroeder took office in Congress in 1973, she was only one of 14 women in a 435-member fraternity.

“I felt as if I had broken into and entered a private club,” she told me once in an interview. “Most of my new colleagues considered me a mascot or novelty, as if in Denver voters had mistakenly thought ‘Pat’ meant ‘Patrick.”

It wasn’t until early 1992 that women were allowed to wear pants on the Senate floor.

Schroeder is cheered at how things have changed since those formative years for women in Washington. “Even the men have changed. Men are much more involved in their children,” she said. “Kids used to be campaign props, who were to be seen but not heard. Now men boast about their family commitments, more so than women in office.”

And she agrees that by the time our daughters are all grown up it will be completely different.

Gorman put it this way: “Somehow we weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.”

“Even as we grieved, we grew.”

I’m guessing come 2036 when she is eligible, Gorman will actually run for president and nothing will seem very unusual about it.

But when she does, I’m betting she tips her hat to Vice President Harris, who broke the trail for her this week.

In fact, Gorman is already saluting the women who came before.

“I have never been prouder to see another young woman rise! Brava Brava, @TheAmandaGorman! Maya Angelou is cheering — and so am I,” tweeted Oprah Winfrey, who gave Gorman a caged bird ring to honor poet Maya Angelou, who recited at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration.

Gorman tweeted back, “Thank you! I would be nowhere without the women whose footsteps I dance in.”

Dance away in those footsteps, daughters, dance away.