The United States turns 250 on Saturday, although she doesn’t look a day over 240.

There has always been a psychological component that makes certain time designations significant at milestones. When a person turns 100 years old, she gets a big cake and perhaps a story in the local newspaper or TV station. When a person turns 99, it generally comes and goes without fanfare.

Likewise, no one ever stages a 49-year class reunion. Fifty is the magic number there.

So Saturday, in some respects, will be bigger than most Independence Days have been. Before we get too preoccupied with whatever it is we have planned for this milestone day, it’s worth remembering just how improbable it was that the British colonies would become a sovereign, independent nation.

On July 4, 1776, a group of intellectual colonists declared independence from what was then, along with France, one of the most powerful nations on earth.

Contemporary Americans like to think that declaring our independence was a logical decision. In truth, it bordered on insanity.

In 1776, the Americans had no army, no navy, few men with military experience, few munitions and no military budget.

You couldn’t begin to calculate the odds of an American victory.

It took more than eight years of war and considerable help from France to make the Declaration of Independence a fact rather than a premise. About 30,000 Americans — roughly 1% of the population — died in the war, which would be the equivalent of 3.5 million deaths today. By that standard, America has never paid a higher cost for freedom than it did during the Revolution.

From the distance of 250 years, it is tempting to take all this for granted.

Yet it is quite possible, even likely, that Britain could have won the war.

What would that have meant?

It’s hard to imagine that the U.S. would be under British rule today, but when or how that would have changed is difficult to assess.

It is not blasphemy to say that a British victory would have benefited some Americans.

Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, freeing enslaved people across most of its empire. If Britain had won the war, chattel slavery in the U.S. would have ended much earlier than it did and without the brutal carnage of a Civil War.

At the time of the Revolution, the British Empire was actively trying to check the westward expansion of American colonists. In fact, the Proclamation of 1763, which prohibited colonial settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains, was a primary grievance of the revolutionaries found in the Declaration of Independence. A victorious Britain likely would have maintained treaties with Native nations to act as a buffer against further colonial expansion, delaying or significantly altering the devastating displacement of Native populations.

Had Britain won the war, the U.S. might have become a British commonwealth like Canada or Australia.

Who’s to say that we wouldn’t all be having tea as we watched cricket matches?

No doubt, the ripple effects of a British victory would have been enormous all across the globe.

Imagining a different outcome is a fun and harmless exercise.

The reality is that the United States and the world are as they are.

On Saturday, we celebrate all the good that reality has blessed us with.

The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.

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