Rochester column honors the Range

Greg Sellnow: Feeling at home on Da Range
Rochester Post-Bulletin

HIBBING — You can grow up in Minnesota. You can prepare wild rice soup, walleye cheeks and tuna macaroni hot dish with the best of them.

You can know the difference between a forecheck and a poke check and wear a gold and maroon sweatshirt to bed every night. You can eat lutefisk twice a year and claim to like it.

But you cannot call yourself a true Minnesotan until you’ve spent some time on Da Range.

I tell folks I’m from Up North. I’ve even told people I grew up just a few miles down the road from Da (Cuyuna) Range. But the truth is I’m just a Ranger wannabe.

I spent last weekend in Virginia and Hibbing for a youth hockey tournament, and the timing was good. After trips over the past year and a half to places like Ireland, Wyoming, Ohio and, well, the Mall of America, I think I’d begun to lose touch with my inner Minnesotan.

Our state’s iron ore and taconite mining region, which covers much of the northeastern corner of Minnesota, has played a vital role in our history.

A place where entire towns were moved so miners could get at the rich ore deposits below.

A place that’s sprouted Olympic and NHL hockey players, a pop/folk singing icon, and even an eccentric dentist-turned governor.

A place populated by folks with grit, guts and the political will to move on when the mining industry began to play out.

If the Twin Cities metro area is our state’s lifeblood, then Da Range is its soul. It’s Humphrey Bogart to the metro’s Cary Grant.

Most of our team’s players and their families stayed in a hotel in Virginia, Minn., where they give you an actual key for your door — a metal one with grooves.

The cable TV reception wasn’t so good, but that just added to the ambiance. While clicking through the channels, I came upon Hockey Night in Canada, featuring a game between the New York Rangers and the Edmonton Oilers.

During breaks, they ran commercials for a prime-time drama called MVP, which the promo says chronicles “the secret lives of hockey wives,” and for a sitcom titled “Little Mosque on the Prairie.” (I’m not exactly sure what the show is about, but the clip I saw involved teenage girls in head scarves competing in a curling competition — the kind you play on ice.)

During the hour-long post-game wrapup it was explained that the player from the game they’d planned to interview wouldn’t be joining them because he was on his way to the hospital. Instead, there was a call-in segment in which viewers addressed this question: Will new thermal skate blades affect the integrity of the game?

Only in Canada. Only on Da Range.

They take their mining, hockey and curling, seriously here. The legendary U of M player and coach John Marriucci got his start here. So did Miracle on Ice stars Mark Pavelich, John Harrington and Buzz Schneider; along with Jack and Steve Carlson, the Virginia, Minn., natives who were depicted as “the Hanson brothers” in the greatest hockey movie of all time, “Slapshot.”

My son’s team played at Hibbing’s Memorial Arena, an ancient, cavernous building filled with plaques, trophies and banners. It oozes history.

Da Range is, to borrow one of my son’s phrases for most of what he says about my generation, “old school.” And I mean that in a good way.

Folks on Da Range are a proud, history-revering people who understand the importance of having what sociologists and anthropologists call a sense of place. I call it an identity.

What’s ours?