Small towns strive mightily to come up with attractions capable of luring and sustaining tourism trade.

Lanesboro has its bike trails and rolling bluffs, New Ulm wears it German shtick like a badge, and Mankato stays on travelers’ radar with a mix of Minneopa Falls, Maud Hart Lovelace’s old haunts, and large men sweating over a football each summer.

But if a small community really wants to strike tourism gold, having a timelessly beloved movie filmed there is the way to go.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of “Field of Dreams,” the ethos and impact of which has been pondered more than Michael Jackson’s psyche.

The baseball-movie-that-isn’t-really-a-baseball-movie was shot in the northeast Iowa town of Dyersville, a 4,000-resident burg that continues to draw about 50,000 visitors a year to Don and Becky Lansing’s farm.

In the movie, Kevin Costner’s character builds a baseball field in a cornfield after a heavenly voice tells him to do so.

The film touches upon an amalgam of themes — America’s deep roots in the national pastime, bittersweet homages to lost youth, and the nuanced and often conflicted dynamic of the father/son bond.

It’s 107 minutes of fantasy culminating with a father and son playing catch scene that defies the American male not to cry.

In other words, it’s not for nihilists and Grinches. You either buy into it or you don’t. Not much middle ground in this flick.

Meantime, the pilgrims keep showing up at that Iowa farm, which has retained the ballfield and small set of bleachers, as in the film, but save for a souvenir stand hasn’t been junked up or commercialized one iota.

It’s just a baseball diamond amid cropland, and yet, 20 years after the movie’s release, it remains a mecca to people for reasons sometimes even they can’t fathom.

The film’s director, Phil Alden Robinson, sought to explain its undying allure to Sports Illustrated:

“The major leagues are about five percent of what baseball is in this country. Baseball is mostly about things such as having a catch on a warm summer night. I think in one respect (the film) may have reminded people that baseball is more than just the major leagues. Its roots come from having a catch with your dad.”

In 1990, I and Free Press photographer John Cross and my son John, then 12, went to Dyersville for a feature article on the pilgrimage phenomena taking place.

We came upon a scene and an aura unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.