By now it’s a familiar story: a once-mighty regional newspaper is brought low by punishing economics and a series of owners who could not change that math, and is now being scooped up by the local rich guy. In the instance of The Star Tribune in Minneapolis. Glen Taylor, who owns a vast array of businesses —including pro basketball’s Minnesota Timberwolves, an egg producer, a medical device company and a host of printing operations — is making a bid to add the dominant local paper in the Twin Cities to his holdings.

I’ve watched many of these deals unfold in which civic leaders have stepped in to buy the local paper because, well, no one else really wants it. The Star Tribune is somewhat different because it has managed to remain profitable, in part because it never ravaged its editorial staff to the point where it has no value and in part because the publisher, Michael Klingensmith, is a crafty operator who left a high-level Time Inc. position to see if he could make a go of running the newspaper he grew up on.

I grew up on The Star Tribune as well. In my household in suburban Minneapolis, adulthood or something resembling it, was defined by attentiveness to the local sports teams, absorbed through The Star Tribune’s sports section, which we passed around and chattered about over toast and coffee.

It’s hard to envision in the current context of a media ecosystem where endless voices vye for attention, but at the time, Sid Hartman, the loud, opinionated sports columnist, was the voice of God. We’d tease apart his rather rococo approach to sentences for meaning and argue over his conclusions, but it was a single maypole that five men – four brothers and a father – pivoted around.