My friend Willem was hanging out after school - ostensibly we were studying for jazz band because he was new to playing guitar and I was new to playing bass. But he got bored and asked me if I'd ever heard of D&D, which I hadn't, and then ran a tiny little scenario just using a made-up character for me and a d6. I think my character had to explore a cave and defeat an orc. In retrospect, it is pretty impressive that he effortlessly created an ultra-basic version of the game for me to try.
Willem then invited me to play a game with his older brother, who was in college, that weekend. That was my first real game, early 1e, and it was just my brand new character, a level 1 ranger (18/94 strength! I had no idea what that meant but knew it was good because they were both excited), Willem's much higher level character, and his brother's character, played as an NPC, tracking down and defeating a young dragon. It was incredibly exciting, and I went up to level 3 immediately because of all the treasure (which I later realized was the point). I even got a flametongue 2-handed sword. After that, I was hooked, and joined a group that Willem knew at my junior high school. And we got to bring our characters and play with the college guys on occasion, which as you can imagine was the coolest thing possible.