EVELETH, Minn. — Tom Violette can trace his curling start to the Iron Range. It’s where he grew up, lettered in high school in the 1970s and recently sat on Thanksgiving weekend reflecting on the busiest, craziest and perhaps most important couple of years curlers have ever experienced.

As a snowstorm raged outside Curl Mesabi, inside some of the best curlers in the world had descended on Eveleth, making the city of roughly 3,500 people a hub of activity for the sport.

Downstairs the curlers stretched in the hallway and gathered around iPads strategizing. Many American curlers have stories set on the Iron Range and northeastern Minnesota that involve family, competitions and the like. They talk about the small curling communities within small towns here, where everybody knows the same people and the same places.

Upstairs the spectators filed into the club to catch a glimpse of the diverse and uber-talented group of curlers collected on the ice below, themselves an assembly of different parts of the U.S.

The biggest moment in American curling history was born during the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang.