(When my in-laws were lobbying me to move here, they showed me something they called “fun”: During one of Minnesota’s vicious winter cold snaps, they boiled water on the stove and threw the water off their second-floor deck. The boiling water froze into a cloud of tiny ice particles in midair, floating down onto the snowpack on their backyard. “Fun!” I backed away in horror, resolving never to move here. Then I got married and did just that.)

To most Americans, this sort of cold would be known as a severe marketing problem. Who the hell wants to live in a frozen hellscape for three (or four, or five, or six) months a year? But Minnesotans are people who sit on frozen lakes with cans of Grain Belt Premium and dip their fishing lines into holes in the ice for hours at a time. Being able to withstand (enjoy?) the darkest depths of winter is a point of pride.

I first came to realize this during last year’s NFL playoffs, when I watched the Vikings lose to the Seattle Seahawks in one of the coldest games in NFL history. Former Vikings head coach Bud Grant was scheduled to flip the coin pregame. The 88-year-old Grant took off his coat and handed it to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell: “Would you hold my jacket while I go out for the toss and show how we love this weather?” Grant walked to midfield wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt and a Vikings ballcap. It was negative 25 windchill. The crowd roared at the intersection of America’s favorite sport and Scandinavia’s favored mentality.

One year later, I convinced eight friends to join me for my first ice-fishing trip up north. Don’t worry: Our icehouse came equipped with DirecTV so we could watch the NFL playoffs from the middle of a lake. These people are insane.

When Dayton’s acclaimed restaurant, The Bachelor Farmer, was founded in 2011, Dayton had the feeling Minnesota was always trying to, in its hippest spots, imitate someplace else: a Vegas-style nightclub! A restaurant that makes you feel like you’re in New York City! A rooftop bar that transports you to Santa Monica! But when The Bachelor Farmer had its first breakout moment, a four-star review in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Dayton was struck by what the reviewer wrote: that the restaurant captured the zeitgeist of Minnesota with an edgy and unapologetic brand of modesty.

“There’s an initial modesty to the food—actually, to the whole Bachelor Farmer experience— that dovetails into the soft-spoken Midwestern ethos,” the review read. “Yet understated should not be confused with simplistic.”

“That was the best thing anyone could say about the restaurant,” Dayton says. “Why do we have to pretend to be someplace else in order to be great? I just wanted to contribute something to the city, to let people know that, yes, Minnesota can be cool.”

That also happened to be the same time Nordic countries had become an international symbol of cool. Restaurant magazine first ranked Noma as the best restaurant in the world was 2010 (then again in 2011, 2012 and 2014). New Nordic cuisine swept across the world and brought new interest to the region. Pundits tried to figure out what made Scandinavian countries consistently rank as the world’s happiest. Baltic-style democratic socialism became the governmental dreamscape of American progressives. The Danish concept of hygge became a mantra for minimalists worldwide.

Meanwhile, television shows like The Killing, books like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and bands like Miike Snow, Little Dragon and Lykke Li introduced us all to Scandinavian pop culture, and frankly it seemed a good bit cooler than our own. A book about the mystique of Scandinavia was released; it was titled The Almost Nearly Perfect People. “The global pull of Scandinavian life, never weak, continues to strengthen,” read The New Yorker’s review of the book. “Peek behind a fad these days, in other words, and you are apt to find a Scandinavian, pedalling hard.”

And so there’s perhaps no better time for a place like Minnesota to cast out its put-upon Midwestern-ness and embrace an identity as the American cousin of hip, cool, cold Scandinavia. “Midwest I find to be a putdown for the vast center of the country, as if it’s somehow all the same thing,” Rybak, the former mayor, said. “There’s an enormous difference between being an outpost on edge of the Midwest versus Minneapolis and St. Paul being the Star of The North. A label like The North is a prism by which you can see yourself differently.”