There are cases that have gone stale, of course. A 1998 case on Excite, written before its merger with @Home, makes the portal wars seem as recent and relevant as the Spanish-American War. But two things were remarkable about the cases I looked at: first, how pertinent the underlying business issues in most of them still seemed, and second, what a good job they did of balancing the adrenaline-saturated experience of sealing a crucial deal or going public with the ever-present perils that most of the media were happy to ignore. (Yes, I confess to sometimes being part of that group.) In the world of the HBS case, opportunities for strategic gaffes are much more plentiful than opportunities to do the right thing. Just like the real world.

Cases offer the ultimate opportunity to armchair-quarterback a business situation, and part of the fun of class time at HBS is arguing over which course of action would have scored the most points or avoided the most jarring hits. (That's hard to replicate when you're reading them on your own, unless you're able to hold "Crossfire"-style conversations in your head.)

As students return to campus this week, some of the newest cases they'll consider are those chronicling e-tailer failures. The first gathering of the popular "Managing Marketspace Businesses" course, for instance, will be a discussion about PetStore.com and Boo.com. In fact, Eisenmann had planned to teach his PetStore.com case last spring, but the company's founders, he says, "weren't eager to come into the class while [their company] was going off the rails." (Eventually, PetStore was subsumed into Pets.com.)

There are also cases in the works that will look at how dot-com survivors evaluate their flailing competitors as potential acquisitions and how companies confront stock prices that have imploded. "We're doing our third case on Chemdex [which recently changed its name to Ventro] now," says professor Lassiter, one-time president of Wildfire Communications. "Chemdex went public last September, and the stock went to $240. Now it's around $14. What do they do now? Between the Internet and globalization, you've got to create new materials very quickly."

But while HBS's professors plan to keep turning out new cases and crafting updates, they're not likely to turn their courses into a semester-long series of autopsies. The mainstream media may be having a ball chronicling the splashdowns of a handful of well-known, and not so well-known, Net start-ups that flew too close to the sun, but Lassiter, who has just written a case on optical-networking pioneer Sycamore Networks -- so far an unqualified success -- says that case studies of dead dot-coms simply aren't that rich in instructional value.

"Yes, there is something to be gained [by] studying flameouts," he wrote in an e-mail, "but less than you might think. There are 10,000 ways to screw up a business, and far fewer ways to make it truly succeed." Studying success and analyzing how it was attained, Lassiter concludes, are a much more useful pedagogical approach.

What you learn from reading a batch of HBS Internet cases is that after all the confetti has been swept away, the fundamental things still apply. Attaining success, for pure plays and established firms alike, is going to be a lengthy trek, not the jaunt to the corner many perceived it to be. The good news for future case writers: The trekkers will encounter plenty of new trigger issues along the way.