It’s said that what’s past is prologue. Well, here’s hoping that old adage does not define our future.

This year is shaping up to be one of the worst years for the housing market in decades, in terms of the number of single-family homes sold.

With some exceptions, if anyone who bought their home in the past six or seven years were to list it today, they would not get back what they paid for it. These homeowners are tethered to yesterday’s values. As a result, they aren’t listing their homes today, and are not becoming tomorrow’s trade-up buyers.

In turn, increasing numbers of potential buyers are looking at the plight of their current homeowner contemporaries and saying "forget it."

Conventional wisdom – some might call it yesterday’s wisdom – has told us that because of such a market, we cannot hope to sustain the kind of economic growth we want, need and expect for this country.

In August, the U.S. had its credit rating downgraded for the first time in history. Stock markets swung wildly on domestic and European debt worries alike. Bipartisan political "progress" became a punch line. Municipal budgets nationwide continued to shrink, unemployment remained inflated, the pace of foreclosures locally picked up and housing sales remained comatose.

Conventional wisdom says all of those things should have probably pushed us into a second recession.

But still, we grew.

We grew at a 2.5 percent pace nationally, and a 3.9 percent clip in Massachusetts. Neither of those figures is what anyone would call "robust," but given all the headwinds we endured over the summer, it’s certainly noteworthy.

So isn’t it time to at least consider some unconventional wisdom – mainly, that for once, perhaps we won’t need the traditional, sales-driven housing market to play the enormous role it has played in most prior recoveries to still fulfill our growth objectives?

In other words, what if the past, in this case, isn’t prologue?

It’s not hard to see a seismic shift taking place locally and nationally in terms of housing policy and its heretofore outsized effects on growth.

Attitudes on homeownership have changed, whether our industries choose to recognize it or not. All the hoping and praying from Realtors – and everyone involved with residential real estate, including us at times – for a return to pre-crisis sales levels hasn’t yielded anything. Frankly, those pre-crisis levels were, with hindsight, inflated and clearly unsustainable anyway.

But we’ve proven that growth no longer has to be dependent on putting everyone in America, or Massachusetts, into a 3-bedroom colonial with a picket fence and a swingset. That’s old-fashioned thinking. Instead, today’s growth comes through brilliant technological innovation, through creative ideas and bold moves. And our policies should reflect this.

Rental housing provides an inherent flexibility that may end up being more appealing to today’s on-the-go workforce. Instead of bemoaning this, why not embrace it?

For those that do choose to buy, business innovators are coming up with creative concepts to help reduce some of the risk involved. Equity insurance is an imperfect idea now, but it’s a creative solution that we think definitely merits serious consideration.

Housing finance in and of itself is and should be undergoing a fundamental shift. We are beginning to contemplate a landscape without the wild and speculative secondary market largely fueled by Fannie and Freddie. Instead, we hope regulators are prudent enough to realize the value in a primary funding market helped along by a strengthened Federal Home Loan Bank system that offers advances for prudent loans, not rewards for risky loans doled out after the fact.

If we’re going to continue to defy conventional wisdom as we define today’s "new normal," at some point these unconventional ideas need to become conventional themselves.

We live in an extraordinary time when what’s past no longer has to define what’s to come. That’s worth embracing, no matter how difficult it is to let go of what we know.