Finally free of a fascinating Park City election cycle, I tripped into preseason on Main Street last week.

I learned Red Banjo Pizza might have had its best day ever just after Thanksgiving, and Main Street merchants agreed with each other that the Black Friday weekend was terrific for their businesses, busy as could be before dying again the next long week still without snow.

Red Banjo co-owner Tana Toly thought back to another hopping time for the restaurant — the holiday ski patrol strike, exacerbated by a distinct lack of snow. Maybe good for business for a few days, but not so much how you’d want a season to go. Should the next one ever get going.

I saw Tana at a couple of meetings, beginning to dig in again after her dominant council reelection and record number of votes that belied all the conventional wisdom concerning possible reasons for the seven-vote difference in the mayor’s race between Ryan Dickey and Jack Rubin.

I checked in with Flanagan’s on Main owner John Kenworthy, and we crossed the street to No Name Saloon & Grill. JK’s restaurant was closed in a pause before leaping into the holiday season around the corner. Everyone knows everyone, especially around No Name, Flanagan’s, The Marquis and The Cabin, this band of mid-Main brothers.

Here, the afterglow from the election still ran a little, um, nuclear. Longtime friendships fractured in the heat, and I always will puzzle how something as ultimately trivial as a City Council race is worth that, though of course I’ve seen it before.

Election campaigns at full pitch can do something not great to us, a kind of blind fever that typically cools into reflection and even regret at some point later. Maybe as the temperature outside drops and the snow starts really falling, I thought. Ample snow changes everything in a ski town.

And this is only trivial to me, an observer from a certain distance and still new enough as well as by nature to not get entangled in any of the cliques that make up a community.

No one and everyone can speak for what they perceive as the community. But a community can only be an amalgamation of smaller clumps of the like-minded and/or shared interests. This may be a function of our deep-seated lizard brains over which our frontal cortexes have only been pasted. Us vs. them is a prominent if disappointing feature.

We checked out the basement construction mess that in two days was supposed to transform into the highest-end Velvet Room below The Cabin in just two days for a soft opening.

A skeptical JK, looking around the brick room, expressed his trademark blend of rapid-fire exuberance and advice that can easily land wrong in a different environment. Junior Richards, the longtime GM at The Cabin, was overseeing the transformation from flannel and ball cap to what I understood as super lux speakeasy.

“I’ll take that bet,” Junior drawled patiently as JK peppered him and openly doubted it would open in time. I recall I shared the skepticism.

Then back to the No Name and a table upstairs to hear about plans from a genial actor JK told me was famous to open a fine tequila bar in the Marquis next to Chefs Dance. He was sitting with Marquis owner Kenny Griswold, who aims to extend the restaurant downstairs from a Sundance Film Festival experience to something more enduring, and the tequila bar designer whose name, sigh, I also didn’t catch. (I need more time with Aric Bostick, human engagement coach, who taught us at Red Banjo during a chamber event in September how to remember names better.)

My list of story pitches for colleagues grew even as I struggled to hear through the cacophony of recorded music and the many conversations that made up a surprisingly busy bar on a Monday night during the eternal interim before ski season.

The writer I pitched to check out the possibility of a Velvet Room soft opening a couple of evenings later invited everyone, it seemed, at our Christmas party. I wound up dropping off my daughter and fiancé, who had become fast friends with The Park Record crew during the party, and having a beer at No Name with my beloved. It was another semi-busy, very fun evening at the 25-year-old staple, the rock-n-roll soundtrack pitch perfect for a couple of, er, young boomers on a rare night out.

Naturally, we couldn’t keep from checking in at the Velvet Room — dark, misty, loud, packed in a velvety, old-time way. Our kids were the last ones standing of the squad that had gone. They had made lots of new friends at the back of the bar. Soon my wife and I were cool by association and making new friends, too. Which seemed to be the whole point.

We bumped into Junior, and met Bryce Clarke, who had moved from Las Vegas and a career with the Tao Group to see if he might bring some of that magic here.

I’m name dropping — those I remember, anyway — since it was that kind of week. I don’t get out much, not like this anyway, so very cool to peer into new spaces, meet new people doing things that were new to me and entirely unrelated to elections.

The week wrapped up for me Friday night high up from Main Street proper, at the Montage. We won a precious invite to a fundraising gala for the Kamas Valley Community Foundation, a recent rethinking of the South Summit Education Foundation that now extends beyond the core educational support to include recreation and the arts, along with humanitarian causes and health care.

Suits and ties, like I wore, were outnumbered by flannel and Christmas sweaters, and as I looked around the tables I saw many more glasses of water than wine, like mine. But I felt completely comfortable amid a whole sea of another distinct community I hope someday to know better. The live auction was scaled much closer to my size than the tonier ski town doings, too.

Meantime, the story list went long enough in my head to wear down a new pencil. I couldn’t wait to pitch ’em all and maybe find time to take on some myself. We’d made it to the cool kids’ table, with various board members and community leaders, including husband/wife Rick Shapiro and foundation Executive Director Amy Lecocq, who invited us.

We left the Montage that night to the winter paradise the world prizes so much about us, starting with the row of tall, lighted trees in a snow globe scene driving off from the hotel and inching down the white, white and slippery road.

Deer Valley Resort would open to winter’s first accumulation the next day, to join Park City Mountain, which opened Friday. Looked like game on now. At last.

Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.