Starting Wednesday, 16 boys teams from every corner of Minnesota will gather at Xcel Energy Center for the Minnesota State Hockey Tournament, one of the most renowned amateur sporting events in the country.

As has been the case every year since 1992, Bloomington Kennedy will not be among the 16. The Eagles — once an every-year contender for a state tournament berth — will never have that opportunity again.

Junior goalie Dominick Russell leads Bloomington Kennedy out for warmups prior to the final hockey game in the program’s history on Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2025 at Aldrich Arena in Maplewood. (Jess Myers / Pioneer Press)

In 1987, Bloomington Kennedy won it all, but from that point on, it was a long, slow descent for the Eagles, who played their program’s final game on Feb. 19 at Aldrich Arena in Maplewood — a 13-1 loss to top-seeded Chisago Lakes in a first round Section 4A playoff game.

“It’s my last game in a Kennedy uniform ever. It’s pretty emotional,” Eagles goaltender Dominick Russell said after the final horn sounded. “We got stomped, but I had fun out there with the boys one last time.”

Bloomington Kennedy fielded a boys hockey team for 60 years. Included in those six decades were seven trips to the state tournament back in the one-class days, a state runner-up finish in 1984, and their lone state title three years later.

For much of the 1980s, Bloomington was a true hotbed of prep hockey in Minnesota, with one of the suburb’s two public schools — Kennedy on the east side and Jefferson on the west — playing in every state tournament of the decade. When they would face each other in the regular season twice a year, fans would be lined up in the cold outside Bloomington Ice Garden hours before the puck dropped with the hope of getting a few square inches of bleacher seating.

That 1987 Kennedy team avenged a regular-season loss to Greenway of Coleraine in the state semifinals, then ended Burnsville’s quest for a three-peat with a 4-1 win in the title game. Of the 20 players on the Eagles roster, seven of them went on to play Division I college hockey, with two more skating at the D-III level. Eagles captain Joe Decker played a notable role in Wisconsin’s 1990 NCAA title just a few years removed from high school.

With a massive new shopping mall under construction just a few miles from Kennedy High School, and the Minnesota North Stars playing NHL games in the neighborhood, East Bloomington seemed like the center of Minnesota at the time.

But changing demographics, and more families for whom hockey was either unfamiliar or unaffordable, or both, moving into the district meant a gradual decline in numbers for Kennedy youth hockey, which fed the high school program.

“Not as many kids playing hockey,” said Brandon Tveitbakk, who coached the Eagles in their final season. “There’s a lot of families that are moving in that are first-time English speakers. Hockey is likely not a sport where they move here from. Hockey’s new to a lot of these families, and it can be intimidating to try if you’ve never done it before.”

The Eagles made their last state tournament appearance in 1991, then saw a migration of young families move to further-flung suburbs, and schools such as Apple Valley, Blaine, Elk River, Eden Prairie claimed state titles over the next few decades. It’s worth noting, in fact, that four of the newer powerhouses in prep hockey — Rogers, Andover, Chanhassen and Maple Grove — are from outer-ring suburbs and didn’t have programs the last time Kennedy played a state tournament game.

“Hockey just seems to be moving out and out and out,” Tveitbakk said

The Eagles are far from the only team in the Twin Cities or other inner-ring suburbs to see things change. Minneapolis and St. Paul public schools play hockey in consolidated programs, as do Burnsville and Apple Valley. Richfield co-ops with a private school. Rochester John Marshall is part of a co-op, as well.

With open enrollment allowing players free movement, and with successful private schools such as Holy Angels in their neighborhood, the Kennedy player pool got progressively smaller over the past decade. Kennedy’s youth program was absorbed by Jefferson a few years ago, and starting next season, that will happen with the high school program, as well.

“Any (Kennedy) underclassmen this year will be eligible to play for Jefferson next season,” Tvietbakk said. “I’ve got a great relationship with the Jefferson staff, too, so I’ll be able to put in a word for our boys next year and hopefully have a little bit of a voice.”

Russell already has, ending his junior season with a 53-save effort in the loss to Chisago Lakes. Kennedy’s final campaign finished with a 1-24 record, and opponents put up double-digits in goals 10 times. But the goalie left the rink looking forward, not back.

On the ice after the game, he tipped his cap to senior Mason Biermaier, who scored early in the third period for the final goal in Kennedy hockey history.

“Going out and seeing one more goal in the third was fun, even down 12-0 or 10-0, whatever it was,” Russell said. His personal goal is one more year of high school hockey, even if it means wearing the powder blue of Kennedy’s crosstown rivals.

“I’d love to play for them next year, and if they’re open to having me, I’d love to be on the roster,” he said.

Smiles were harder to come by for other players, who — despite all of the lopsided losses — weren’t ready to see their season, or their program, come to an end.

Senior forward Tony Perkins huddled with five teammates at center ice for a group hug long after the handshakes were over and nearly everyone had left the rink. There were tears on the ice and outside the locker room as the Kennedy Eagles slung navy blue gear bags over their shoulders and prepared to catch a home-bound bus one final time.

“It’s a great honor. The guys in the penalty box were reminiscing about what a powerhouse Kennedy was, and it kind of puts into perspective how moving this whole season was, not only for us but for the whole program,” Perkins said. “I’m not ready to let go of this. I don’t know how I’m going to walk out of this rink tonight.”

An exhausted quartet of Bloomington Kennedy players — Isaac Syrjamaki (2), Anourak Carlson (5), Braden Thornburg (16) and goalie Dominick Russell — head off the ice for the last time following the final game in the Kennedy program’s history on Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2025 at Aldrich Arena in Maplewood. Kennedy fell to Chisago Lakes 13-1 in a Class A, Section 4 quarterfinal hockey playoff. (Jess Myers / Pioneer Press)

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American political culture goes through phases. Between 1933 and 1963 that culture went through a Hamiltonian phase. Leaders believed in centralizing power to build big things. Franklin Roosevelt created the Tennessee Valley Authority and the rest of the New Deal. Dwight Eisenhower built the national highways system and founded NASA.

A lot of the stuff the centralizers did was great, like New York infrastructure czar Robert Moses’ building Lincoln Center. Some of the stuff they did was horrific, like Moses’ destroying Bronx neighborhoods to put in a highway.

Somewhere around the late ’60s the culture shifted in a decentralizing, Jeffersonian direction. A new generation of conservatives and progressives emerged who were suspicious of centralized authority and instinctively against the establishment, and who railed against “the system.” People with less power were automatically the good guys, and people with more power were automatically the bad guys.

On the right, Republicans from Ronald Reagan to the Tea Party crusaded against elites and the swamp in Washington. On the left, progressive activists like Ralph Nader and the environmentalists sued the government to halt development projects. Progressive community activists empowered neighborhoods to take on and stymie city hall. Federal workers passed masses of regulations to micromanage everyday life on a worksite. Republicans and Democrats joined forces to pass the National Environmental Policy Act, the California Environmental Quality Act and the Endangered Species Act, all of which could be used by activists to slow down and halt housing and transportation projects.

The decentralizing Jeffersonians overshot the mark. A group of activists who came of age during the New Deal era concentrated power to get things done. Then, a new generation of activists who came of age during the 1960s rebelled against concentrated power and made it nearly impossible to get anything done. This became the pattern.

In 2008 California set out to build high-speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco, promising that it would be finished in 2020. The project was blocked by a thousand little barriers, and now a scaled-down line between Merced and Bakersfield may open in 2033 at a cost, so far, of $35 billion.

In the United States it costs roughly $609 million to build a kilometer of rail. In Canada it costs only $295 million and in Portugal, $96 million. Because of regulations and the lack of cost-effective production, a basic elevator in New York City costs about four times as much as that same elevator in Switzerland.

Progressives proved especially effective at blocking new home construction. A study in California found that as the share of liberal votes rises by 10 points in a given city, the number of housing permits issued declines by 30%. In San Francisco, according to one 2023 state report, it took 523 days on average to get clearance to construct new housing and then 605 days to get building permits, if your project wasn’t killed in the meantime by lawsuits and citizen action.

One result has been scarcity and higher prices for the things that get regulated, like housing. Another is that highly educated people found they could game the permitting system and prevent poorer and less educated people from sullying their neighborhoods. Another is that when government tries to do big things, like build clean energy or rail lines, it finds it can’t act. The irony is this: Progressives, who believe in using government to do good things, have built a system that renders government incompetent.

But now the culture may be shifting again. Over the past several years, various versions of something called the abundance movement have been growing at libertarian-leaning think tanks like the Niskanen Center, at right-leaning tech hubs like Andreessen Horowitz and at a wide array of left-leaning think tanks. The core argument is the need to get rid of regulations that make it impossible to build things, and we need to invest money in order to achieve great things.

This winter the abundance movement is having its coming-out party in the form of three spectacular books by some of its more prominent champions.

Next month, Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s book “Abundance” will be published, offering a comprehensive indictment of the current problems and a clear path forward.

This month brought us Yoni Appelbaum’s “Stuck,” a historical account of the forces that have produced the current housing crisis and its social and cultural effects.

Marc J. Dunkelman’s new book, “Why Nothing Works,” is an intellectual history that describes the ideas and values that first drove people like Moses to act the way they did and the values that drove the next generation of activists to oppose them.

These three books have significantly altered the way I see our current political morass. (Klein, Thompson and Appelbaum are colleagues of mine at The New York Times and The Atlantic.)

Dunkelman summarizes the history perfectly: “In ways big and small, Jeffersonian protections have prevented the movement from expanding the nation’s housing supply, delivering high-speed rail and replacing carbon-emitting power with clean energy. We’ve become so terrified of Hamiltonian figures making bad decisions that we’ve curtailed government’s ability to make tough calls.”

Appelbaum describes the way all this stasis has enervated American life. He points out that our housing crisis is not just a cost crisis; it’s a mobility crisis. In the 1940s and 1950s, about a fifth of Americans moved. Then came the zoning and other regulations that progressives championed. Today, only 1 in 12 Americans moves every year.

People can’t afford housing in the places where opportunity is plentiful. That means fewer Americans are moving to improve their lives and fewer are climbing the social ladder. When people move to new places, they join churches and civic organizations to meet new people. When mobility slows, social and civic life, paradoxically, deteriorates. More Americans are, as Appelbaum puts it, stuck.

In their book, Klein and Thompson usher in a mood shift. They inspire hope and enlarge the imagination by describing the good things that are actually within our grasp: abundant energy, cheaper housing, affordable cities, shorter workweeks, lab-grown meat so that we no longer have to use 25% of global land to raise livestock.

“What is needed here is a change in political culture, not just a change in legislation,” they write.

Will the abundance movement take flight? There are some obstacles. A lot of people, especially rich Democrats, like having the power to block development around them. Public sector unions tend to instinctively defend bureaucracies and the regulations promulgated within them. The abundance folks call for both deregulation and more spending. Many progressives hate the former and many conservatives hate the latter.

The more troubling obstacles may be cultural. If anything, Americans have grown more cynical and more distrustful of authority than they were even in the 1970s. In an essay in The New Atlantis, American Enterprise Institute scholar Yuval Levin points to a “willful paralysis that oddly passes for sophistication in our elite culture now.” Americans now have trouble thinking about the future in the way previous generations did.

Levin continues: “It often bespeaks a kind of vanity unable to imagine the world without ourselves in it, and to take pleasure in benefiting our successors. The future, after all, is the home of other people — people who will follow us when we are gone. To build durable infrastructure for future prosperity is to build for those other people. And the inability to value those other people and judge them worthy of our work and sacrifice is a characteristic failing of a decadent society.”

Yet I strongly believe the abundance movement will form an important faction within the Democratic Party and maybe in the Republican one too. Democratic politicians including Kamala Harris and Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts have seized some of its ideas. There is a natural tendency in our country to move in a Hamiltonian direction after a period of Jeffersonian ascent, and such a shift is overdue. Most important, the arguments these authors make are utterly compelling.

It’s interesting to read these books during the Trump Anschluss. In some ways President Donald Trump can be seen as an extreme response to a government that can’t get anything done. The problem is he’s skipped over the Alexander Hamilton model of centralizing authority and gone straight to the Vladimir Putin model. If we still have a country when he is done, we’re going to need a better establishment.

So I’d close with some questions for educators:

Every society on Earth has a leadership class of one sort or another, so are you educating your students so that they can build a better establishment? Are you arming them with sensible views about authority so that they don’t childishly dismiss all forms of it? Are you training them to be in touch with their fellow citizens, so that they don’t rule imperiously from above? Are you training them to embrace the obligations that fall on them as leaders, to serve the country and not their own kind? Are you trying to inculcate in them both the humility to know what they don’t know and the audacity to reach for abundance?

David Brooks writes a column for the New York Times.

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Crews this week broke ground on a three-story upscale apartment complex in Mahtomedi that is being built on the site of the former Lakeside Club, which was featured in the movie “Fargo.”

City officials approved plans for the $14 million project at 10 Old Wildwood Road in 2022, but developers decided to “let it sit” for a few years because of construction costs and interest rates, said Greg Johnson, president and CEO of St. Paul-based Hearth Development and Nottingham Construction.

“We’ve been working on this since 2016,” he said. “We finally got everything aligned.”

The 39-unit rental complex – called Lakes of Mahtomedi — will feature a lower-level parking garage with 45 stalls; a golf simulator and a fitness center; a pet-wash area; office spaces for residents, and a third-floor party deck overlooking the 17-acre site, he said.

“Our goal is to make this a really first-class product,” he said. “We’ve got some really cool amenity spaces. We feel that there is a good target market of people who want to stay in the community, but don’t necessarily want the maintenance of the home or the yardwork or all the things that come with living in Minnesota.”

Company officials plan to start signing leases in November of December; the building is expected to open in April 2026, Johnson said. Rent prices have not yet been finalized, Johnson said; they are still working on rent analysis.

The Lakeside Club, which was shuttered in 2020 after about 60 years in operation, was demolished after a fire in the vacant building in 2022. The building achieved fame after it was featured in the movie “Fargo.” When Police Chief Marge Gunderson (Oscar-winner Frances McDormand) interviews a couple of prostitutes, Gunderson’s patrol car can be seen parked outside the club in the snow.

Johnson said the complex will pay homage to its “Fargo” fame and to the former Wildwood Amusement Park, which was located nearby. The complex’s community space will feature historic photos of the park, which operated from 1889 to 1932, Johnson said, and the third-floor party deck will feature photos of the Lakeside Club and “Fargo.”

“We’ve got some memorabilia that we were able to get from the previous owners of the Lakeside Club, so we’re definitely going to incorporate that feel into a couple of those community areas,” he said.

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Today is Saturday, March 1, the 60th day of 2025. There are 304 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On March 1, 2005, Dennis Rader, the churchgoing family man accused of leading a double life as the BTK serial killer, was charged in Wichita, Kansas, with 10 counts of first-degree murder. (Rader later pleaded guilty and received multiple life sentences.)

Also on this date:

In 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act, making Yellowstone the nation’s first national park.

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In 1932, Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., the 20-month-old son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh, was kidnapped from the family home in East Amwell Township, New Jersey. (Remains identified as those of the child were found two months later.)

In 1954, four Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire from the spectators gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives, wounding five members of Congress.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order establishing the Peace Corps; since its establishment, over 240,000 Americans have served as Peace Corps volunteers.

In 1966, the Soviet space probe Venera 3 made contact with the surface of Venus, becoming the first spacecraft to reach another planet. Venera was unable to transmit any data, however, because its communications system failed.

In 1971, a bomb went off inside a men’s room at the U.S. Capitol. The radical group Weather Underground claimed responsibility for the pre-dawn blast, which damaged the building but resulted in no injuries.

In 1974, seven people, including former Nixon White House aides H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman; former Attorney General John Mitchell; and former assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian, were indicted by a grand jury on charges of conspiring to obstruct justice in connection with the Watergate break-in. (These four defendants were convicted in January 1975, though Mardian’s conviction was later reversed.)

Today’s birthdays:

Rock singer Roger Daltrey is 81.
Actor Dirk Benedict is 80.
Sen, Deb Fischer, R-Neb., is 74.
Filmmaker Ron Howard is 71.
Actor Tim Daly is 69.
Hockey Hall of Famer Ron Francis is 62.
Filmmaker Zack Snyder is 59.
Actor Javier Bardem is 56.
Basketball Hall of Famer Yolanda Griffith is 55.
Basketball Hall of Famer Chris Webber is 52.
Actor Mark-Paul Gosselaar is 51.
Actor Jensen Ackles is 47.
Actor Lupita Nyong’o is 42.
Pop singer Kesha is 38.
Pop singer Justin Bieber is 31.