If the mayor of a city is its best representative, then Dallas has a broken heart. “We don’t like to lose. This does not make us happy,” Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said at a press conference Tuesday, referencing Amazon’s decision not to select his city as a location for its second headquarters. “We competed hard, we competed well, but we did not succeed,” he went on, sounding like a coach addressing a team who thought it had the big game in the bag. “I like to win so my heart’s broken today.”

Officials in Dallas, like those in hundreds of other cities across North America, took part in an unprecedented competition for a prize known as “HQ2“: shorthand for becoming the home of Amazon’s second headquarters, outside Seattle. Those cities’ lobbying efforts — replete with economic subsidies, tax breaks, non-disclosure agreements and publicity stunts — lasted more than a year. But while smaller metros such as Columbus, Ohio, and Raleigh, N.C., made Amazon’s “short list,” the trillion-dollar tech behemoth ultimately decided to go with the most conventional, and perhaps least disruptive, choice. On Tuesday morning, the company awarded its HQ2 prize, along with some 50,000 high-paying jobs, to the metropolitan areas of New York City and Washington, D.C.

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