As the first speakers began their monologues, I was at the bar outside the ballroom drinking with a few other reporters, and we were trying to puzzle out why CNN was carrying the event live. But the dinner, more than anything else, is a networking carnival. Over four days, you spend evenings meeting anybody who considers themselves important.

Trump tried to defeat the weekend by telling his staffers not to attend the dinner, but even he can’t defeat Washington’s insistence on being seen. Kellyanne Conway was spotted at a number of events, and I spent Thursday night at a party drinking beside former White House press secretary Sean Spicer. It was one of those moments when we are reminded that the political class changes names, but it never changes its behavior.

The decision to invite a historian rather than a comedian to the dinner was scorned by just about everybody in Washington except those who consider themselves serious. But author Ron Chernow was a better speaker than expected, especially after a few glasses of wine. We weren’t subjected to anything too dry, and he managed to get a few laughs and rounds of applause.

Though it sounds tacky, I wish the dinner was what it used to be. I remember watching on television as Stephen Colbert torched George W. Bush at the 2006 dinner and looking forward to the speakers in the next years. Colbert’s lashing that night was so big, there’s now a lengthy Wikipedia article about the moment. I remember seeing the faces of celebrities in the room on the television screen and being impressed. It’s hard to imagine anybody being introduced to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this year will have that same reaction to the moment. We certainly won’t see Chernow’s speech rebroadcast on the networks for the analysts to dissect. I haven’t even stumbled upon one of Chris Cillizza’s breakdowns of the event, and it seems that’s because the man who cuts every political heartbeat into bullet points didn’t find this year’s dinner worth writing about. He did one of those pieces last year and found Michelle Wolf’s routine so important that he took notes on his phone during the speech, according to his breakdown.

All of us are guilty of pretending that we’re too cool for the event, and this year is the first year that we might actually have been correct. And that’s a shame because a celebration of the Washington media has never been a more important event than it is today with a president who is openly hostile to us. Media figures have become actual celebrities. Our more elite Washington reporters do spots on late night shows; Jake Sherman and Amy Palmer of Politico and Jim Acosta of CNN have appeared on Colbert’s show in the Trump era. Maggie Haberman of The New York Times has appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers. And their moment of fame is unique to the Trump era. Unfortunately, so is a tamed-down dinner without a comedian.

The dinner is a big deal in Washington because it’s always been one of the moments when people actually noticed us. Our calendars are full of events that are just as written about and some of them are actually still fun. Every year we have a State of the Union address, and in late June, we’ll host the Congressional Baseball Game in which members of Congress face off against each other at Nationals Park. The game has been played annually since 1909 with only a handful of interruptions, making it older than the Correspondents’ Dinner.

The future for the dinner itself does not look promising. It’s a piece of this city that you wonder if Trump has actually managed to destroy, like the daily press briefings and the (often forged) appearance of civility in the halls and Twitter handles of Congress. Though we might not admit it, we all hope that the next president will attend the dinner and that it might go back to the way it was, with celebrities in the audience and a comedian daring to toe the line between comedy and outright insults. But, then again, we hope for a lot of things in this town.