Fourteen games per team. A defined start in April. A defined finish in July. Balanced home-and-away slates. Built-in byes. Repeat matchups that suggest geography matters again. It reads less like a marketing flyer and more like an operating plan.
Duluth’s most significant population story of the last 60 years is not growth — it is survival. That alone deserves credit. But it does not justify the current narrative.
The City of Duluth now spends roughly $1 of every $7 in the general fund on debt service. That’s money that can’t pave streets, fund libraries, or expand housing programs. And yet the answer to each new challenge is the same: another bond.
Awal was among the councilors who supported restoring annual funding for Duluth’s mental-health crisis response team after Mayor Roger Reinert proposed eliminating the city’s share of the program’s budget.
Reinert enters 2026 with two failed endorsements hanging around his neck, a lost council majority, a newly emboldened progressive bloc, a budget minefield, and a downtown recovery that needs more than slogans and cheerleading.
The question in 2026 isn’t just “Do you like Tim Walz?” It’s “Can he still make this particular map work one more time?” Right now, the answer is probably yes. But for the first time in his governorship, that “probably” comes with a real map of places where he can lose this thing.
Hermantown is playing a schedule that looks like it handed the AD a crayon and told him to circle every team that makes teenagers cry.
There was a long stretch where I took the easy way out — publishing press releases instead of stories. Once, I even ran a release to serve the organization that turned out to be plagiarized. That mistake haunted me. But it also humbled me. It taught me that cutting corners comes with a cost.
Jerry Kurz on the Monsters: “Very strong franchise. We’re very selective. I get calls every week from people who want to join. But we have to be sure they’re giving something back to the community. Jake (Lambert, owner) and Steve (Walters, general manager and minority owner) want that."
No one’s saying a banner’s coming soon — heck, we’d settle for a .500 record and a home win over Iowa. But watch closely. You’ll see something forming here, underneath the dust and the growing pains. A plan. A pulse. A program.
This isn’t science fiction; it’s how rural medicine is already evolving. Duluth could simply be the first to turn it into curriculum — a digital rural residency, training doctors to serve wider geographies with smarter tools.
We headed down to the bridge for what we called a “feasibility study.” Translation: three guys staring at the water with thermoses. “Looks cold enough to me,” Dale said. “Yep,” Roger nodded. “Perfect for servers.”
You can’t police despair. You can shuffle people from doorway to doorway, but that’s optics, not safety. The folks drifting between shelters and liquor stores aren’t statistics.
It’s civic theater, and everyone knows their lines. The officials announce. The media nod. The television anchors beam. The advertisers clap. And the citizens — the actual audience — sit at home wondering if they’ve accidentally tuned into satire.
The old fellas at the café won’t need a study to understand it. They’ve seen this dance too many times before. They’ll sip their burnt coffee, shake their heads, and say what they always say when the next “big thing” blows through town: “Should’ve just built another rink.”
Duluth has a plan. The question now is whether it has the guts — and the will — to knock down the roadblocks standing in the way.
