If there was any question about it before, there should be none now. Nashville, the city where I was born and learned many valuable life lessons, has arrived.

I couldn't help but beam with pride when the National Football League recently announced that Music City will be hosting the 2030 Super Bowl. Yet that pride was mixed with a bittersweet realization it's unlikely I will ever again live in a city where I spent nearly half my life.

Nashville has changed. And the Nashville I knew, to a great degree, no longer exists.

It's nobody's fault. Cities grow. And as they grow, some of them change in ways that make them unrecognizable even to those who know them well.

Nashville has risen beyond humble origins

Nashville and I had a really good run. I grew up in East Nashville and never lived anywhere else until I finished high school. I returned, decades later, for an eight-year stretch where I worked as a state government communications officer.

I've lived in many other cities across four states and one foreign country, but none of them anywhere near as long as I've lived in Nashville.

I remember Nashville being country when, as the Barbara Mandrell song went, country wasn't cool. The city was always known as the capital of country music, but when I was growing up, it had few other claims to fame.

Hosting a Super Bowl? When I was a kid, it was a watershed moment when........

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