Entertainment Weekly recently had a bracket to find the Best Young Adult Novel of All Tine and the Harry Potter series was voted the Best! The series was first pitted against Holes by Louis Sachar, next up was The Giver Quartet series by Lois Lowry followed by Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card and it beat The Princess Bride by William Goldman (which happens to be a favorite of mine – because of the movie I read the book.) The final book it had to defeat was To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.

But after winning another decisive victory over Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower in the bracket’s Final Four, TFiOS hit a wall. In the end, there was really no contest: John Green’s book won just over a third of the final vote; the rest went to J.K. Rowling’s masterpiece.

Why? For that answer, we’ll have to turn to a rather unlikely source: John Green himself, who wrote on his Tumblr that his own final vote “obviously” went to Harry Potter. His explanation: “HP is the most important story for a generation of readers and is one of the central reasons that my career even exists, so it’s a bit silly even to be in the ring with it here at the end.”

With that, Green just about sums things up. The Fault in Our Stars is a great book. But to millions and millions of people — old, young, anywhere in between — Harry Potter is more than that: It’s a cultural beacon, a secular religion, a way of life. And a full six years after the final book in the series was published (and two years after the final film adaptation’s release), the saga’s impact has hardly diminished. There’s simply nothing else like Harry, and there may never be anything like him again — despite the best efforts of publishing houses and movie studios alike.