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A year ago around this time, a group of friends and I got together for a new campaign with a home-brewed ruleset. I was the only one with any experience roleplaying.
     We played about a dozen or 15 sessions of that campaign before attendance forced a premature end, and we played another 5 or 6 one shots on top of it.
     Well, my old players switched to a new day I couldn't play players has taken up the mantle. Now, I'm making a new campaign with only one of the old players, and he started talking to me about the old campaign and how much he misses it. "REALLY?!" I said. The entire thing, I thought, was pretty disastrous. Early on the party had screwed my storyline and I flew by the seat of my pants the whole time. Moreover, most of the encounters were just goblin slaughters and one of the players has become thetypical allusion for the group referring to a completely broken character. In short, nothing went according to plan and, honestly, half the reason I stopped it was because of the stress of having all my careful plans trammelled.
     But the funny thing? He talked about it like it was the most fun he'd ever had. He brought back old memories about truly epic kills and the funniest NPC's, who I honestly forgot about. To me, that campaign had about 3 highlights and a bunch of filler. For him, I realized, it was the exact opposite.
     Thinking back, I realize how much I love those characters we made. I love how Araghast Stalinaskovich the dwarven fighter broke the system beyond repair while not taking everyone's fun away. I love how the NPC Biddles, a local sewer rat, became a central point in about 2/3rds of the sessions.  I love the NPC mad wizard's rhyming couplets and pathetic antics and the pet boar that the rogue tried to keep.
     Looking back, I used to say "God, please don't let this new campaign turn out to be like that one." But looking back now, I remember the laughter and the jokes, the smiles on my players' faces and I think "God, let me run a campaign half that good."
     I think that a lot of DM's give up too easily on campaigns where things don't go according to plan. Even more often, they fail to realize when their players are having fun. I know I didn't, and to be honest, I suspect that if I had, I would still be running that campaign today.  Instead, I'm looking back with watery eyes asking myself how I could have been so blind.
     What's the moral of the story? Be honest with yourself. Don't stress out about a game. Most of all, have fun with it.

     In the (spellchecked) words of my player... '...we were a hodgepodge group of heroes with some vague form of teamwork shambling rambling towards our goal. Sometimes we got distracted and went on little sidequests filled with giggles. Our games were really fun and lighthearted."

     He said other things as well, but I felt that was the most important, because as DM's it's the easiest thing to forget.

Good luck and happy adventuring all!