What is there to love about Suffolk?

That’s the question we asked ourselves last fall as we began planning for the Suffolk News-Herald’s annual Strides edition. Strides — and its previous incarnation, Horizons — has always been the newspaper’s love letter to Suffolk, the opportunity we take each year to concentrate on positive stories and ideas. Community newspapers have a duty to their readers to tell them about the negative things happening in their neighborhoods, to serve as watchdogs guarding the civic trust and to warn readers about those who would take advantage of that trust.

We believe, however, that there’s a related obligation to remind folks who live here that Suffolk is a unique and wonderful place. And that’s how we came up with the idea for the theme of Strides this year — “25 Reasons We Love Suffolk.”

The section, which will appear as a special insert in Sunday’s edition of the Suffolk News-Herald, takes a look at a couple of dozen of the things that really make Suffolk special, the things that are worth remembering when it seems like everything else is going off the rails, the things that bring us all back home from our vacations, even when they’re in exotic and wonderful places.

What makes this section especially interesting is that our readers helped us to choose the reasons that would make the list of 25. Readers gave us some obvious suggestions, but they also suggested some reasons that we might have overlooked without their reminders. What’s frustrating about the section is that we had to limit our list to 25 reasons for space considerations. Anybody who has lived in Suffolk for long could make a much longer list without breaking a sweat.

We’re excited to share this section with you, and we hope you’ll share your thoughts about it with us. And we especially hope that you’ll pick up the paper on Sunday and find something about Suffolk that renews your sense of wonder about the city.