Those seemingly interminable dark walks between houses, long before street-lit safety became an issue, were more adrenalizing than the mountains of candy filling the sack. Sadly Halloween, with our good-natured attempts to protect the little ones, from the increasingly dangerous traffic and increasingly sick adults, has become an utter bore.

Springer contrasts the remembered thrill of childhood Halloween—especially the suspense of moving through dark, unlit spaces—with the comparatively flat reward of candy. The “interminable dark walks” evoke a safe, self-directed brush with fear that made the night feel adventurous. In the second sentence, the tone turns elegiac and critical: modern precautions and social anxieties (traffic, and “increasingly sick adults”) have, in the speaker’s view, domesticated the holiday into something overmanaged and joyless. The quote reads as a lament for lost communal trust and for a kind of imaginative risk that once made ordinary neighborhoods feel like wilderness.