You probably missed it.

At precisely 1:02 a.m., the time and date momentarily locked into consecutive order to form this eerie display: 01:02:03, 04/05/06.

You have another fleeting chance to see it this afternoon, but look fast: You won’t see it again for a century.

The sequence doesn’t really mean much, a professor at NYU’s Courant School of Mathematical Sciences said.

“The observation of strange or interesting patterns is not nearly as unusual as people think,” Charles Newman, who studies probability theory and statistical physics, said.

Another NYU professor of physics and mathematics, Dan Stein, said the world has another interesting date to look forward to in 61 years, when the clock and date will show 01:02:03 04/05/67.

Even better, Mr. Newman said, will be that magic moment after midnight or noon on July 8, 2009, when the clock strikes 12:34:56 07/08/09.

Others, however, disagree about the mundanity of it all. “It’s a special time in the universe,” a numerologist in Manhattan, Rose Welsh, said. “Very powerful. Very strong.”

Ms. Welsh, who does readings for New Yorkers over the phone, said, “This part of humanistic development has completed. The next stage will be a much more intellectual, spiritual one. The human condition is definitely going to go through an evolution.”

Those on the other side of the pond will have to wait, evolutionarily speaking. Europeans won’t hit the witching hour until May 4. In England and on the Continent, they write the day first, then the month and year. New Yorkers weren’t taking the once in a blue moon phenomenon too seriously. The manager of an off-track betting location on Lafayette Street said he hadn’t heard anything about the pattern affecting bets. A teller at Lazer Check Cashing just down the street said no one had bought lottery tickets with the numbers.