A McDonald’s Breakfast Any Time of the Day? McWonderful!.

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If only I could get an Egg McMuffin at midnight in Beijing. (Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg)

Capitalism, you have served us well.

Puerto Vallarta, Jal.- The Invisible Hand of the market has finally managed the unthinkable: It has gotten McDonald’s to contemplate all-day breakfast. Slipping market share has forced it to think, er, outside the bun.

As any number of people on the Internet will tell you, breakfast at McDonald’s is one of the great boons of this life.

Part of its charm was that it was so difficult to obtain. You had to get up in time for breakfast, and — this was cruel. But it made you love it. Waking up and wrangling your way to the McDonald’s window before the signage flipped was, for those of us not naturally inclined to early rising, the equivalent of one of those fairy-tale challenges where the protagonist must shinny up the side of a glass mountain to pick up lentils while being pursued by a mortar-riding crone with iron teeth. And if the clock struck 10:30 before you could get there? You turned instantly back into a pumpkin.

But it was all worth it. Your task completed, instead of a princess whom you had seen once in a dream (who wants a princess you have seen once in a dream, anyway?), there was the Egg McMuffin. Or the Sausage Biscuit With Cheese. Or — any number of the equally wondrous boons that McDonald’s has bestowed upon us.

For so long, McDonald’s insisted that it could not alter the way it did things. The grill simply could not serve two masters. It was Breakfast or regular McDonald’s. It could not be both. And so all-day breakfast remained, elusive as the McRib or true love, always slipping from our grasp.

Someone wise once observed that when you eat at McDonald’s as a kid, it’s a triumph, and when you go there as an adult, it’s a defeat. This does not hold at breakfast. Breakfast is always a triumph.

Was this lengthened breakfast inspired by McDonald’s lagging market share in the face of the rise of the Taco Bell breakfast menu? If so, this is the greatest gift Taco Bell has ever given us.

I assumed the only thing that could give us all-day breakfast was for humanity to enter a new millennium of peace and goodwill.

But no. Even in these ill times in which we live, it is being tested in a few locations (San Diego first) for a possible nationwide roll-out. A nationwide roll-out!

Much is amiss in the world today. War, famine, poverty — well, I can’t in good conscience say that this in any way makes up for or ameliorates any of those, and I am sorry in retrospect to have brought them into this sentence. The Egg McMuffin is good, but it is not that good. But we were only talking about fast food. In the world of fast food, there are certain laws, as immutable as “You do not talk about Fight Club” and “No one goes beyond the Wall.”

And now we have broken through. We have gone beyond the 10:30 wall. Breakfast has penetrated into the wilderness beyond. Something, for once, is going right.

McDonald’s, I promise, if this goes nationwide, not to grow blase. I will not come staggering into McDonald’s at 7 at night in pajamas and hair curlers, taking the presence of a chicken biscuit for granted. The first thing, maybe. But not the second thing. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. But this, we have waited for, all our lives. It’s time.

Alexandra Petri writes the ComPost blog, offering a lighter take on the news and opinions of the day.