It's hard to pinpoint the moment that the Twin Cities disappeared from the national and local consciousness.

That's because the fade and ultimate death of Minneapolis-St. Paul and its metro area was such a gradual thing that almost no one noticed.

Only recently has it become clear that our home city is known, both to ourselves and to outsiders, as simply "Minnesota."

This is a bizarre turn. We live in an era of cities. Metropolitan areas have emerged as the basic units of a dynamic global economy.

Metro Seattle competes with metro Denver, Dallas, Munich and Mumbai for creative talent, good jobs and the next slice of prosperity. With a population of 3.3 million, our own metro city is the 16th largest in the nation.

Together with the other 99 largest metros, we produce three-quarters of the nation's gross domestic product and nearly all of its new ideas. To put it bluntly, cities are in the driver's seat; states are along for the ride.

Never has it been more important, then, for a city to have a strong identity and a competitive brand. For Chicago to become Illinois or Atlanta to become Georgia would be almost suicidal.

And yet that's what has happened here.

For years I had been vaguely aware of our slipping identity, but it hit me with a jolt this summer when I overheard each of our grown children, now living on the East Coast, tell friends that they would be going back to Minnesota for a family wedding when I knew perfectly well that the wedding would not be in Fergus Falls or Bemidji but in Minneapolis, with some festivities in St. Paul.

And I recalled distinctly that in the mid-1970s when my wife and I first moved here, we told our friends we were moving to Minneapolis, or to the Twin Cities, because that's the way it was described on our main point of reference -- the "Mary Tyler Moore Show."

It was a way of saying that we were moving to an up-and-coming urban place.

Apparently, we no longer live in such a place, but rather in Minnesota, which is a different concept altogether.

Don't get me wrong. I love our state -- every lake, every pine tree, every dairy cow.

But Minnesota isn't a city. And its image has been vividly framed by talented satirists and storytellers, mainly Garrison Keillor and the Coen brothers.

To most of the world we are eccentric small-town people who sit in the Chatterbox Cafe while snow piles up outside. Or, we are overly earnest "Minnesoootans" with Fargo accents and simpleminded ideas.

Our self-deprecating humor is a fine trait, and I laugh louder than almost anyone.

But seeing ourselves as an amusing backwater carries a price in the serious game of attracting the young, creative talent that will produce the next wave of prosperity. It's a wave that we can't afford to miss.

To brand our energetic, artistic and quite excellent city as Minnesota is a bit like Coca-Cola telling the world it's a pretty good beverage in the cola family.

The question quickly becomes: Can our city compete if it doesn't have a name?

I admit that my "invisible city" complaint has become something of an obsession. When I bring it up at parties, people shuffle their feet and suddenly need to refill their wine glasses.

Still, I press on, hoping that the ever-mounting evidence will convince people that our city has all but disappeared, to wit:

• The New York Times obituary for Keillor's sidekick Tom Keith said he was featured on "a broadcast on public radio in front of a theater audience in Minnesota, or in other cities on tour." (Reminds me of the NFL player who said that Minnesota was his favorite city to play in.)

• Describing the major media markets Eleanor Mondale had worked in, the Star Tribune's obituary about her said: "Her broadcasting career took her from Minnesota to Chicago to Los Angeles and back to Minnesota."

• Several Star Tribune stories described Delta Airlines corporate jobs shifting from Minnesota to Atlanta. Another Strib story talked about job cutbacks among "Medtronic's 8,000 Minnesota employees." Just this month KARE-TV mentioned that 200 Minnesota jobs were being lost at Andersen Windows. (All of these jobs were in a place formerly known as the Twin Cities.)

• The New Yorker magazine mentioned sharing a phone call with Walter Mondale "from his home state of Minnesota." (Mondale's home and office are in Minneapolis.)

• My favorite came last June when MSNBC's Rachel Maddow recalled that Sen. Larry Craig had been arrested "in a Minnesota airport."

All of that reminds me of the man who stopped me at a baggage carousel at the Tampa airport to ask: "Is this the flight from Minnesota?"

Or of a friend's New York mother who arrived here for her first visit and gasped: "You have a city here!"

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Even this small sample prompts a few questions: How did we drop off the map? Does it matter? If it does, what should be done about it?