The place is an alcoholic and a hippie, a scenester and a sports star, a handbag-crazy nature freak as at ease in the library as in a disco.
It's a town of around 100,000 that fills a stadium holding nearly as many weekend after weekend every fall.
It has an indefinable essence, the kind of easy charm that has seduced artists of every chord, from our era's folkie giants, like Bo Diddley, Tom Petty and Sister Hazel, to the cutthroat flashpan of top-40 fame, like Less Than Jake and Against Me!
It's a mecca for a religion of pigskin and Heisman heroes, with roots in a tiny place called Hogtown, once upon a time just a little railroad stop skirted by Civil War skirmishes.
The city runs on a fuel of human experience, year after year of fresh-faced teenagers, a late-summer bloom of new minds ready or not to plunge into a place that becomes, for many, more than a degree factory.
Somehow, four years on, the city and its surroundings stop feeling like an inanimate municipality.
It becomes an old friend, a love, a study partner and a drinking buddy.
It's a cradle for so many firsts for so many people, a place where grandpa and grandma grads can go on for hours about their alma mater and the city it couldn't do without.
For others, it's where they find their husband or wife, where they experience first keggers, toe-curling orgasms or nights away from home.
They'll never forget the smell of those first dorm rooms, the sight of an underwear run or the endless sea of game-day orange and blue.
But a constant remains for all but the few who have a falling-out with the city: It's the place where they grew more than they ever had before, where red bricks and old trees and a long-painted wall become more than they actually are.
That's Gainesville.
And I'm in love with the place.
Four years ago this week, I moved into my first UF dorm room. Prior to that, I had visited Gainesville one time before college, and that was for the tour.
Since then, I've grown and changed. So has the city.
Then something happened. Upon my return from summertime last week, I rode my bicycle up and down streets for hours and miles just to bask in the glow of Gainesville during a semester start.
The excited clusters of freshmen wandering with maps and lanyards. The day-labor guys on street corners, waving signs advertising cheap liquor and mattresses, chicken wings and laundry service. The subtle pleasure of getting a thrill out of seeing a Gators license plate or bumper sticker and then realizing that here, that's the natural way of things.
I also rode around to get reacquainted.
This fall is different from any other I've had with Gainesville. It is my last as a student, and for the past nine months, I have been out of town, gallivanting with the likes of Miami and St. Petersburg, working for newspapers.
For someone who swallowed the Kool-Aid long ago and dreams about University Avenue some nights - surreal visions of 2 a.m. bar crowds and racing to class on my Cannondale but never making it no matter how hard I pedal - nine months is an era come and gone.
So the rush I felt when I finally settled back a few days ago was like embracing a lover after too long a separation.
Then reality set in.
While distance may make the heart grow fonder, time changes all things. I'd been gone long enough that the city had gone on without me.
The feeling was like visiting home from college only to find that your parents had moved, and the new house doesn't have a room for you.
Every day since has been a rediscovery of a friend I thought I knew so well.
While I'm still struck by reminders of why I feel so connected to this place (Burrito Brothers and the crisp smell of campus after a good downpour), I notice new things at an astonishing pace. And while these changes may be hardly earth-shattering for some, even called progress by others, for a guy like me who's enamored with the idiosyncratic and au naturale beauty of the place, they can be unsettling.
The trail of change began far from Gainesville itself, beaming into my car over the airwaves as I drove up I-75.
I always knew I was close to the city when I could hit the No. 2 preset on my Pathfinder's stereo and fill the cabin with the eclectic joys of 100.5 The Buzz.
This time, I got an earful of top-40 rock and teenybopper punk.
A year ago, the Buzz's advertisements decried Linkin Park, Staind and Disturbed, bragging "We don't play any of that dog s***."
The station needed to broaden its audience and turn a profit, I know. But that little piece of Gainesville I loved was still gone as fast as it took me to reset No. 2 to National Public Radio.
Merging off the freeway and onto Archer Road, the theme of bigger, nicer and name-branded snapped into an even sharper focus.
I found that the Indian Cuisine mom-and-pop store on Archer was shuttered, its little strip-mall earmarked for upscale redevelopment, including a Shane's Rib Shack, the southern cousin of Moe's Southwest Grill.
Adjacent to the place, a Kohl's department store - so close to opening that workers were arranging clothing racks inside - had sprung up from a vacant parking lot in little more than a semester.
Not that these new places won't be useful to people (the spot where the department store was erected had been vacant for months, the site of a sagging old Win-Dixie, and Indian Cuisine was able to set up shop down the road), but they represented change, commercialization.
And change, especially the elimination of things that can't be reproduced anywhere else, can be scary.
So the sight of yet another Dunkin' Donuts - an icon for brand uniformity and conformity I've tasted from L.A. to Bangkok - going up at Archer and 34th Street stung me with a pang of loss, rational or not.
Then there were the housing developments.
The Bartram apartments standing pretty where the dilapidated Gatorwood once sagged. The half-dozen new condo multiplexes slowly eating away the student ghetto and its quaint houses and storied tree-lined streets. The stalled University Corners project that has left a two-block corner of University Avenue rubble-strewn and useless for two years. The concrete skeleton of University Club, also languishing in a state of construction limbo across from Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, like a tombstone for the typically old-Gainesville haunt of Dirty Birds - an always fun hole-in-the wall beer shack.
For a guy who has lived in every kind of traditional Gainesville abode - the Simpson Hall dorms, the student suburbs of Lexington Crossing, a 400-square-foot student-ghetto hovel apartment to a house with a big tree-filled backyard - this strange, new and expensive phenomenon of multi-story, multi-million-dollar condo construction is scary indeed.
Maybe it's the authors I read - Carl Hiaasen, Jeff Klinkenberg and Thomas McGuane, all lamenters of the de-florification of Florida. Maybe it's all the time I've spent lounging around the student ghetto, cycling through San Felasco Hammock and Paynes Prairie or sitting cross-legged in the Plaza of the Americas with a plate of Krishna food.
Maybe it's just coming back to Gainesville and recognizing something that's been there all along.
Upon my return this final fall, the development of Gainesville sprung at me like a big, loud ad for some new wonder drug or He-Man truck or sex, sex, sex deodorant body spray.
While my memories are set and safe, I wonder if the type of relationship I have with Gainesville will have a place in the lives of those thousands of students yet to meet this one-of-a-kind place.
