A lovely teenager named Courtney Chou Lee wore the crown and rode down Colorado Boulevard.
But for many people who watched at home Thursday, the real queen of the 120th Rose Parade was the 65-year-old with the brilliant red hair and the relentless smile who described the pageant from high above the parade route.
Stephanie Edwards returned as television hostess of the New Year's Day spectacle, causing a quiet celebration among fans of the tried-and-true, who raised a ruckus when Edwards was dumped two years ago.
There she was beside longtime co-host Bob Eubanks, in a return to a sugar-plum yesteryear, when no trivia was too trivial (Bob: "In Roseville, shopping is king. It's got the 11th highest retail sales of any city in California,") and no hyperbole too hyper (Stephanie: A "Sesame Street"-themed entry is "one of the favorite floats of all time").
Most viewers who e-mailed the KTLA-TV website made it clear they wouldn't have it any other way.
"Thank you KTLA for correcting an error and bringing back Stephanie Edwards to her rightful spot in the booth," a viewer named Kim wrote in an e-mail to the TV station. "It just hasn't been the same without her over the past few years! Looks like 2009 will be a good year as the balance of order has been restored!"
Edwards' ouster had been viewed as ageist, sexist or just plain foolish by thousands of fans, who considered her and Eubanks as integral to New Year's Day as a midnight kiss, a hangover and a long day of college football.
Heaping indignity on insult, her fans had to watch on New Year's Day 2006 as management of KTLA (which, like the Los Angeles Times, is owned by Tribune Co.) pushed their Stephanie into a street reporting assignment in a driving rainstorm. Edwards gamely soldiered on.
The next year, the station dumped Edwards altogether in favor of a much younger morning news anchorwoman, Michaela Pereira.
Pereira didn't ask for the assignment and treated Edwards with deference, but that didn't stop some disappointed fans from vilifying her as the brazen other woman.
The ever-chipper Edwards thought she had transcended the loss of her nearly three-decade assignment. But then she sat down to watch the parade with relatives in her native Minnesota in 2007. "I cried through the whole parade," she recalled.
Edwards spent one more year on the sidelines before "the little miracle," as Edwards put it, when new management at KTLA recalled her to her post.
