IF YOU LOVE PENNSYLVANIA -- and let's face it, no matter how much we complain, no other state feels like home -- you've got to love what happened in Scranton over the weekend. Despite two days of almost constant rain on Friday and Saturday the capital city of NEPA (Northeastern Pennsylvania) won the hearts and minds of Hollywood during the three-day Office-Con, a gathering of cast, writers, producers and thousands of fans of the NBC hit comedy The Office.

I took the two-hour ride up the Northeast Extension Saturday morning in funereal rainfall that had me feeling sorry for Scranton before I had even arrived. Here was this scrappy luckless town's moment in the sun and the gloomy skies were sucking the very color from the autumn leaves, which have actually turned dramatically 100 miles north. Who knew that a rainy day in Scranton could be fabulous?

And when the skies cleared into brilliant sunshine around 4 p.m., it was like the bouyant karma of the gathering had won the battle with nature. From the hilltop campus of the University of Scranton, where the The Office Convention was headquartered, downtown Scranton seemed to gleam in a halo of golds and russets from the tree-crowded hillsides.

It looked every bit as beautiful as The Office executive producer Greg Daniels had described it minutes earlier in a crowded press conference where he became perhaps the first person , with a straight face anyway, to compare hardscrabble Scranton with the mythical Emerald City. "As we drove into Scranton for the first time it was like arriving in Oz after reading about it all those years," Daniels said. "The surrounding area is so much more beautiful than the dusty brown lots in Van Nuys (California) where we create our show."

The Office has made famous an old saying that a Scranton cop told me dates back to the days of vaudeville, "There ain't no party like a Scranton party, cause a Scranton party never ends." And The Office cast partied like it was still 1999. They sang karioke late at night, they jammed on stage with the local band, the Scrantones, Philly-born Kate Flannery (who plays Meredith) joined the band to sing along to the Pennsylvania Polka, and Ed Helms (who plays Andy) summed up the cast's experience, "It's like we're the Beatles in Scranton."

And in a way, this quirky TV comedy series is doing for Scranton what the Beatles did for Liverpool, what Rocky did for Philadelphia. It's making a home town suddenly feel special in the eyes of the world for being what it's always been. Itself.