If there was one moment of the entire run of "Seinfeld" that a generation of women could seize upon as its own, it was when Elaine lost "the contest" -- in which the Seinfeld buddies bet on who could go the longest without masturbating -- because she'd seen John F. Kennedy Jr. doing aerobics. Who could blame her? What mortal woman could refrain from impure thoughts after gazing upon such a sight? As she slapped her losses on the table, she sheepishly offered one simple excuse to her fellow bettors: "John-John." That's all the explanation we needed.

When I was growing up, I never understood the hysteria over the Kennedys, though my mother shared in it. She still proudly possessed a JFK campaign button and a yellow copy of the Daily News from the day he'd won the presidency. She boasted of how she'd shaken his hand once, and that he was the handsomest man she'd ever seen. But Kennedy died two years before I was born, and he and the rest of his family just seemed to me like tragedies I'd seen on the news or scandals we talked about at the dinner table. Then, around the time I hit high school, everything changed.

John-John, the boy we'd known only as the sweet faced tot saluting at his father's grave, went off to college and emerged, fully bloomed, from out of nowhere. Goodbye, Duran Duran. Au revoir, Matt Dillon. They were the heartthrobs of little girls. It was John who now seemed the logical idol of sophisticated young women.

At first, his appeal was largely physical. He had the thick, wavy hair of his mother and the straight, strong jaw of his father; he was lean and tan. In those days, we watched from a distance as he goofed around and dated, attempted and failed passing the bar a few times, and seemed for all the world like a very handsome, very privileged kid who didn't quite have his act together. Oh well, at that age, neither did we.

But then, in spite of his wealth and stunning looks, he grew up. He was a Kennedy, no doubt, but he was unlike the others. Poised and aristocratic, he looked in the news footage that followed his every move like a man who floated rather than using his feet. Head bowed slightly, striding quickly through the crowds that pursued him, he had the air of someone regal yet humbled. He never seemed quite convinced that so much fuss could be over him. Like his mother, he intuited the necessity of privacy, and like her, he was determined to prove himself in the working world when he could have simply coasted on his name.

The Kennedy men could probably have anything they wanted, but John was one of the few who never assumed that off-putting familial air of entitlement. He dated his share of starlets and he floundered for a while in his career, but we certainly couldn't picture him seducing a baby sitter or drunkenly running around the Florida compound with Uncle Teddy.

Instead, we saw him frequently at his mother's side, two shy, quiet, figures who didn't entirely fit in with the rest of the clan. So devoted to her and understanding of her maternal concerns was he that he only learned to fly after she'd passed away -- perhaps her own history gave her a heightened foreboding of disaster. And when rumors flew that Daryl Hannah was being abused by her soft-rock boyfriend Jackson Browne, the papers reported that it was her old friend and beau John Kennedy who'd helped her get out of the relationship.

It may seem like a bit of tabloid trivia to some, but to many of us, it was confirmation of why we were so enamored. He wasn't just the shirtless hunk sailing around the Vineyard, his perfect hair never moving in the breeze. He seemed a truly kind and decent man.

People magazine called him the sexiest man in the world, one of its 50 most beautiful. Magazines scrambled for excuses to put him on their covers, knowing they'd fly off the newsstands. But if half the world seemed to adore him as a pin-up, revere him as a son who'd lost his dad much too early and respect him as a struggling lawyer, the other half saw only a pretty boy drifting through life. From the first moment his magazine George was announced as a concept, the snickering started. He had an enviable Rolodex, for sure, but did that really make him think he could be an editor?

He gave it what looked like his best effort, and while George never entirely took off the way he'd hoped, it actually attempted to do something intelligent and provocative. And we had to admire its founder for trying, with all eyes on him and many enviously anxious for him to fail, to do something unique with his life.

He settled down and married Carolyn Bessette, a woman as lovely and graceful as himself. If the sound of hearts breaking could be heard all across the country that late summer day he emerged from a small Southern church with his slim, chic bride, there was at least some consolation in knowing he'd picked someone so flawlessly suitable. She made him shine even brighter -- the two of them, black clad, young and elegant, seemed the American ideal. They weren't how we are, in our collective love of all things big and loud and showy, but how we'd like to be -- subtle, discreet, confident enough to be quiet about ourselves.

Beauty is a genetic luck of the draw, but there was no way a young man with those parents wasn't going to come out a winner. And sure, like Elaine, we may have let that John-John butt fuel our fantasies. But he couldn't have held our hearts as well as our libidos if there were nothing more to him. As we grew up and older with him, we saw him turn into our Prince Charming -- the sort of man we could imagine would be nice to our mothers and let us cry on his shoulder.

His name and good looks took him far, but what made him extraordinary was that in a world of crotch-grabbing rock stars, adulterous presidents and petulant movie actors, he seemed to be that rarest and most prized of creatures -- a true gentleman.