Tales of Two Cities: Sports Detente

Minneapolis is one of  the "Twin Cities". St. Paul is the other. I've often thought that calling these twins is strange. They are quite different considering the cultural, business and governmental differences.

As a long time "Minneapolitan", I can tell you that people here often live within their designated city and its suburbs and rarely go to the other unless work makes it a requirement. It's not that we don't like each other, it's that often social circles just don't "go there".
Our national baseball team is named the Twins. We name things here to try to get ourselves to identify with the "other" city and the rest of the state. Good for marketing.

Our newest professional soccer team is the Minnesota United. Soccer representatives are currently trying to convince each municipality that it would be great to build another stadium just for the United. Minnesota United seems like a bit of an oxymoron given some historical differences between the cities and what used to be called "Out State" by the media... but maybe the name will unite us?

If we were to rename our professional football team (a good idea as I've always thought the purple Vikings don't represent our dominantly plaid and T-shirt style) it should be something equally unifying. We should get away from the Scandinavian theme that's a bit past its time. How about "the Winners"? For anyone who knows the team's reputation for losing important games, I would hope that would be inspiring.

Tallying Expensive Stadiums
	Twins	1
	Vikings	1
	Lynx	0.5
	Timberwolves	0.5
	Saints	1
	TCF- Gophers	1
	MN United	1
	Total	6

Let's see...tallying it up... the Vikings stadium and the Twins stadium are new in Minneapolis. St. Paul has national hockey, the Wolves, at downtown Energy Center and a minor league baseball team, The Saints, at a new stadium (CHS, memorable no?).  Well, Minneapolis has men's basketball, the Timberwolves and women's basketball, the Lynx, are both playing at the newly remodeling Target Center. Don't forget the new U of M Gopher's football stadium (named TCF) is in Minneapolis. A new soccer stadium will be built "somewhere" for the MN United.

To be fair, our St. Paul side of town needs a soccer stadium to maintain the detente between our cities.