You might say Greenfield had a “Cinderella run” in the Strongest Town competition. Out of 16 municipalities across North America, we made it to the Final Four, and we didn’t have the Strong Towns pedigree. Who would have picked us?

The “Cinderella story” has been a popular one in college sports, particularly in basketball. We like a Cinderella story in America, because we tell ourselves that in America, anybody can rise up in our economic system through hard work.

The original fairy tale version of the Cinderella story is the story of a highly stratified society where despite the odds against it, a deserving young servant girl rises up to a place in society — a princess — that she isn’t predicted to reach because of her social standing.

Like Cinderella, Greenfield is also lowly in a number of ways. For one, it’s the county seat of the poorest county in Massachusetts. Even in the forgotten western part of the state, we are the neglected corner. We don’t have the summer houses of the Berkshires, we don’t have the Five Colleges of Hampshire county, and we don’t have the big cities of Hampden county. And even in our own county, Greenfield has the reputation of being the down-on-its-luck former factory town, where property values are low, taxes are too high and the school system is suspect.

So, for Greenfield to make it to the Final Four of this international competition, advancing through two rounds with some of the most plugged in, innovative cities in North America, well, it seems unlikely.

America, they tell us, loves an underdog story. The story of America has been the story where people can rise, where we don’t have a stratified caste-based system. We modeled ourselves from the beginning in opposition to the aristocratic inflexibility of Old Europe. But we are living in a time where our society is highly stratified, and the ladders are being pulled up.

Today in America, the engines of opportunity are becoming less dynamic, less inclusive, less open. You can see that in higher education, you can see it in the politics around public schools, and you can see it in sports.

In the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament, which is where the terms “March Madness” and our national obsession with brackets comes from, 2025 saw four pre-tournament number ones in the Final Four. No upsets here. The predicting has gotten easier because college basketball has gone from being a vibrant democracy to an oligarchy. Fewer teams have a lock on the flow of talent, because of money. It’s kind of the anti-Cinderella story. Or, really, it’s the story of the stratified aristocratic Old Europe from where the original Cinderella story arose.

I like Greenfield. And I like the hardscrabble story of Greenfield. I’d like to think that a vibrant America that is holding true to the stories we tell about our country’s history is a place where Greenfield can succeed.

What makes a town strong? The Strong Towns organization has some ideas about what towns can do to become more financially resilient and better places to live. The Strong Towns organization opposes what it calls the “Suburban development Ponzi scheme,” which I identify as part of an overlapping impulse to Greenfield’s history as the town that said no to Walmart.

Are we improbable, like Cinderella? I think so. I think Greenfield has this interesting blend of hardscrabble factory town with the most identifiable civic symbol of the Poet’s Seat Tower. As I saw it, my part on the nomination team was to try to capture that spirit, to provide what I thought was the “narrative element” of our pitch for Greenfield. And the tagline I keep returning to is “a gritty city with a poet’s heart.”

The question for us is, what do we do now? We lost a tournament, but that’s no big thing. We ran hard and we went farther than anyone thought we would. What does that tell us? What did we discover about the place where we live?

Andrew Varnon works in the special education program at Frontier Regional School. He lives in Greenfield with his family.