Pittsburgh ? New Hampshire has Mount Washington. In Pennsylvania, we have a Mount Washington, too. They gave the country a lousy president right before the Civil War (Franklin Pierce). We gave the country a lousy president right before the Civil War (James Buchanan). They had an iconic rogue who never became president (Daniel Webster). We had an iconic rogue who never became president (Benjamin Franklin).

They have great lakes (Winnipesaukee, Chocorua and at least two named Echo). We have a Great Lake (Erie). They have a Conway (Carroll County). We have a Conway (Beaver County). They have the most brilliant Augusts. We have the most brilliant August (playwright August Wilson). They have an Ivy League college with a jock diversion (Dartmouth’s Alpine and Nordic skiers this week are competing for their second consecutive national championship). We have an Ivy League college with a jock diversion (Penn’s fencers are competing for a national championship next week).

Heck, if you ignore a few facts – we have nine times the population, 143 times more black people, almost twice the rate of people living below the federal poverty level, a tax burden about 9 million times as oppressive and an extra “h” in Pittsburgh – New Hampshire and Pennsylvania are practically interchangeable. Twins, you might even say.

But the important thing as the Democratic presidential campaign swings into its final big-state confrontation is that for the first time ever, there is going to be a second New Hampshire primary. The first one was in January. The second one will be here in Pennsylvania on April 22.

Here’s why this will be the New Hampshire primary, or at least the New Hampshire primary of legend: The real New Hampshire primary was in January, only five days after the Iowa caucuses. This New Hampshire primary – the one we’re conducting in Pennsylvania – will come seven weeks after the Ohio and Texas primaries that gave Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton another chance to win the Democratic nomination.

That means the candidates will basically live in Pennsylvania for more than a month, the way they used to do it in New Hampshire. They will campaign in every nook and cranny. They will pander like mad. They’ll make charges and they’ll parry charges. They will make us angry. They will make us sick to death of them. (Let’s each of us take a page from New Hampshire’s book and vow not to make a decision until we’ve personally met both Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama at least twice.)

But just because New Hampshire has Cannon Mountain and Pennsylvania has Canonsburg doesn’t mean that Pennsylvania has the tradition of national political trench warfare in its coffee shops, church basements, living rooms, union halls, fraternal lodges and campus student centers.

“It’s a brand-new experience for us here in Pennsylvania,” says Kathleen Iannello, a political scientist at Pennsylvania’s Gettysburg College who once taught at New Hampshire’s Dartmouth College. “No primary in modern Pennsylvania history has meant so much. We’ll see these people in person and hear their words for real. We’re going to have to get our minds around playing this important, and this exciting, a role.”

It’s something new, but it’s also something great. It means the chance for the kind of intimate, retail politics that hasn’t been part of Campaign 2008 since it left the first New Hampshire primary – the chance for ordinary Pennsylvanians to voice their concerns, scrutinize the candidates, even engage in the kind of Norman Rockwell town-meeting exchanges over differences in the contenders’ health-care plans. This is a fine-print moment for an entire state.

Democratic candidates in Iowa trip over themselves in supporting ethanol initiatives that make lots of sense if you’re a farmer in the rural crossroads of Marcus or Nevada but no sense anywhere else. Republican candidates battle in New Hampshire about which one of them hates taxes the most.

For two weeks, candidates of both parties appealed to industrial workers in Ohio. Now that the campaign is coming to Pennsylvania, it’s time to address this state’s peculiar problems, especially issues growing out of our aging people, our aging infrastructure and our aged manufacturing base.

So the soundtrack of our lives for the next seven weeks is going to be a medley of the greatest hits from “Brigadoon” (“Come to Me, Bend to Me,” “The Chase,” “Waitin’ for My Dearie” and “Almost Like Being in Love”). But don’t count out “A Little Night Music” and its signature song, “Send in the Clowns.” The song begins with these two lines, eerily appropriate for what Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama are about to bring to a place that for the first time in the last 200 years finally deserves its name as the Keystone State:

“Isn’t it rich? Aren’t we a pair?

“Me here at last on the ground, and you in mid-air.”