Twenty years ago the atmosphere of Monroe County and Bloomington gained a backbeat right out of a Buffalo Springfield Lyric: "There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear." And, yes, there were battle lines being drawn. Maybe nobody's right, if everybody's wrong.

Bloomington had survived the iconic 1970s, with a character and ethos frozen in time by movies like Breaking Away. But by 1990 some of us started to worry that instead of a happy time capsule, Breaking Away had become an ominous, if still nostalgic, totem to a past now gone replaced by a future not as good.

For while most of us knew what "Bloomington" meant, reality was far more harsh. During the 1980s, IU's financial minister John Hackett had dictated that every university unit become a cost center, had to earn its own way and, with that dictate, were swept away anything not amortizable no matter what the sentimental, institutional or historic value.