Gatorade got a new flavor

[Robinette]

Hello, this may sound like a silly question, but was this Blue flavor mentioned by Buffy true to life or was it fictional ?

This is the third funny dialog that Amy has in her returning episode, Smashed (S6)

Amy: Sorry about your mom.
Buffy: (softly) Thanks.
Amy: It's crazy, all the things that've happened since I went away.
Buffy: No kidding.
Amy: Snyder got eaten by a snake ... high school got destroyed...
Buffy: Oh, Gatorade has a new flavor. Blue.
Amy: See? Head spinning. People getting frozen ... Willow's dating girls ... and did you hear about Tom and Nicole?!

So, it aired in November 2001 and I'm under impression it was set in 2001, and yet the web is telling me Gatorade Cool Blue came out in 2003.

So was it real, or fictional?

Or is it another case of anti-mimesis? Life imitating art.

 

[Moggin]

Didn't Gatorade try some flavors before settling on blue? I remember being stoked about it when it did come out, which would have been in the early 2000s, but I can't remember the exact year. 2003 seems a bit late to me, though. I was almost out of high school by then, and definitely had less reason to be excited about a new Gatorade flavor by then. Maybe it was called something else before the name it has now. I thought it was called something like Mountain Ice, or something like that. I could be remembering wrong, though. It still seems like something they would have had a hard time just making up at the time. People would have known whether or not there was a blue flavor.