Gaining ground in Arizona not only a Super Bowl play. Maybe go for your own turf.

But what does "global Catholic network" EWTN, in Alabama, have to do with this?

PHOENIX — My dentist provides good eye health, too. His ground-floor office has large vertical windows with a relaxing view to the outside: the feeder attached to the glass attracting hummingbirds, the delicate desert-climate palo verde trees with their feathery leaves, the usually blue sky arching above, the nearby prominent brownish mountain to the northeast with saguaros.

I was there for a routine tooth checkup coincidentally a few days before February’s 2023 Super Bowl in suburban Glendale, in the northwest of the Phoenix metropolitan area. My friendly dentist managed to find a rueful aspect to the pretty picture outside his office on this day with temperatures in the 60s: He feared that people from far out of town to attend the football championship would like the surroundings so much that they’d move here.

I’m not writing a Chamber of Commerce promotion here but am laying some groundwork before we look through a different revealing window.

The Phoenix metropolitan area had grown so much that it can take a couple of hours to drive through it from side to side on the freeways, not the surface streets. Will we eventually expand so much that people driving westward through Arizona, from New Mexico on the east to California on the west, have to go through 330 miles of metropolitan Phoenix?

That may be a bit distant yet in the future, but it’s no longer the small city of 1950, which had a bit more than 100,000 people. Even a single one of the Phoenix suburbs these days may be well over that figure, while Phoenix itself currently ranks behind only New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston in population. And that’s only Phoenix itself. The largest Phoenix suburb, Mesa, stands at more than a half-million people. In other words, five times as large as Phoenix was 73 years ago.

At least a couple of major factors started the Phoenix burst after WWII. Military veterans liked what they saw when they had been assigned here, and the advent of easily attained air conditioning mitigated the hot months.

But what about the “global Catholic network” EWTN mentioned above in my sub-headline? Please be patient. We’ll get there.

People moving here from the Northeast or Midwest U.S. may be putting a long drive between themselves and their roots. However, Los Angeles, San Diego and the Pacific Ocean are only about five hours to the west on the roads, if that sounds like compensation. And Arizona isn’t merely desert. The Phoenix elevation is about 1,100 feet (a low elevation for much of Arizona but higher than many other U.S. metropolitan areas). Britannica online says that more than half of Arizona is at least 4,000 feet above sea level.