"Rutland City Buildings" mural by Persi Narvaez in downtown Rutland Driving to Rutland recently, I was taken aback to realize I hadn't been there in 30 years. Back then, I was a sportswriter covering high school football, and Mount St. Joseph Academy, a Catholic high school in Rutland, was a football powerhouse. I made the trip down to write about the Mounties and their hometown rivals, the Rutland Red Raiders (now called the Ravens). My view of the city was from the sidelines, literally. But teams' fortunes change, as do newspaper beats, and I stopped going to Rutland. That changed in early May, when my daughter and I drove 65 miles south on Route 7 for a road trip to Rutland. With a population of roughly 15,000 people, it's the biggest city in Vermont outside of Chittenden County. Its major crossroads of routes 4 and 7, marked by Starbucks, CVS and Burger King, could be Anywhere, USA.