We’ve recently felt a breath of fresh air and a sense of relief with gas prices here in Maine. For quite a while, we were used to seeing prices up in the high $4 range and even topping off a little over $5.

It got to the point where you would see gas for $4.30 and think WOW! That is a great deal! Which is scary.

I think it was last week when I started to see prices fall below $4 and when I saw my first $3.94, I peeled into the gas station and filled ‘er right up.

Over the weekend, however, I had a heart attack.

I was pulling out of one gas station in Westbrook and looked across the street to a different one and saw with disbelief that the price said loud and proud “$9.89” on their light-up sign near the road. I yelled “what!” and immediately stopped the car to take a photo.

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At first, I thought I might need a new glasses prescription. Then, I asked my passenger seat driver if they saw what I was seeing. Once that was confirmed, we decided it had to be a typo, there was no freaking way otherwise.

As we drove by, I broke my neck to look in all directions to compare any other signs they may have up and a tiny one near the gas pump read, “$3.89.” Okay. Phew.

Definitely a typo.

But can you imagine paying close to $10 for a gallon of gas? Back when the prices were rising at alarming rates, I remember hearing news anchors on the TV and reading headlines on my feeds that we could expect to see prices near that toward the end of summer.

I am happy to see the prices dropping rather than heading back up the other way but that gas station typo made my stomach flip. I hope I never live to see that day!

LOOK: See how much gasoline cost the year you started driving

To find out more about how has the price of gas changed throughout the years, Stacker ran the numbers on the cost of a gallon of gasoline for each of the last 84 years. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (released in April 2020), we analyzed the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline from 1976 to 2020 along with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for unleaded regular gasoline from 1937 to 1976, including the absolute and inflation-adjusted prices for each year.

Read on to explore the cost of gas over time and rediscover just how much a gallon was when you first started driving.

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