We didn’t have a flood, thank goodness, and in fact today marks the two-year anniversary of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s muddy walkabout in downtown Napa, where he surveyed the damage from the New Year’s Eve flood of 2005.

May we be so lucky as to dodge further floods until our Napa River and Napa Creek ramparts are finally built.

For locals, though, perhaps the most surprising bit of news in 2007 came from Main Street in Napa, with the announcement that Muriel Fagiani and her relatives have sold Fagiani’s Bar.

More than 33 years have passed since the tragic and violent crime — the unsolved murder of Anita Andrews on July 10, 1974 — that made the place a local landmark. More than 30 years have passed since Muriel Fagiani, Andrews’ sister, shuttered the place for good.

Over the years, Muriel Fagiani has become well-known to Napans for reasons beyond the bar. She is a reliable presence at Napa City Council and other civic meetings, never missing an opportunity to use a public comment period to give the city leaders hell about something.

Fellow residents admire her for this as much as city leaders have grown weary of it. Either way, it has hard to imagine council meetings with Muriel.

Somehow, it is hard to imagine Main Street with new activity inside the old Fagiani’s Bar.

As sad a memorial as the building is to the departed Andrews, it strikes us as somehow sad that the building that has stood in her memory for all these years will now become something new and different. Though plans are hazy and much restoration work needs to be done, the new owner tentatively plans a restaurant at the site, which fits in with Main Street’s renaissance as a culinary hotspot.

In the 30 years Fagiani’s has remained the same, pretty much everything around it has changed. There was no Veteran’s Memorial Park, no Downtown Joe’s, no criminal courthouse, no ZuZu or Pilar.

Change is inevitable, and change in downtown Napa is coming at a fast clip these days. Somehow, the longest-anticipated change to the downtown landscape, one that has been rumored for years, comes as a melancholy surprise.