  We compute the effective potential for the phase of the Wilson line at high
temperature in the standard model to one loop order. Besides the trivial vacua,
there are metastable states in the direction of $U(1)$ hypercharge. Assuming
that the universe starts out in such a metastable state at the Planck scale, it
easily persists to the time of the electroweak phase transition, which then
proceeds by an unusual mechanism. All remnants of the metastable state
evaporate about the time of the $QCD$ phase transition.
