25 years ago, she never meant to go to Dodge City. Now she’s going back.

Maura Dwyer didn’t want to dwell on Dodge City. Not the gunfight reenactment. Not karaoke at the saloon. Not even the moment when three young sisters stepped on a small wooden platform with microphones in hand.

She had been one of 78 passengers on a flight from Baltimore that was grounded after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A day later, the Maryland native was still stranded in a state she’d only ever flown over on her way to California. In a town where you can smell the cows for miles around. In a community that once sat at the edge of the western frontier of America and never forgot it: Dodge City, Kansas.

Dwyer, then 30 years old, stood in the bleachers of a dirt-floor arena with her fellow passengers, their eyes locked on the three sisters. The trio began to sing the national anthem, and they sang it their own way. A one-of-a-kind arrangement that fell into minor keys before the melody somehow found its way home.

Only 36 hours had passed since two planes had struck the World Trade Center. Another plane had crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. And one that took off from Virginia had slammed into the Pentagon, killing everyone aboard. Several people standing next to Dwyer had nearly taken that flight.

For the next 25 years, Dwyer’s grief clouded her time in Dodge City, a surreal and little-known episode shared with strangers. Then, a year or two ago, something changed.

“It was like, all of a sudden, I could think about it. I could go there. I could remember it. And then I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

The day it all started, Dwyer boarded US Airways Flight 29 at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport bound for Los Angeles. Relieved to see that the plane was half empty, she sprawled out onto the seats next to her and fell asleep.

Dwyer had recently moved to Southern California for a job and was back on the East Coast for a wedding. She woke up late that morning at her family’s home in Cheverly and nearly missed her flight.

About 41,000 feet above the Kansas plains, the pilot made a vague announcement. Something about needing to land, passengers recalled, and two words that shot through the plane: “national emergency.”

The passengers looked at one another. No one had any information. Dwyer feared an earthquake in California or, worse, an attack on Washington, D.C. She thought of her brother. He was working as a congressional aide in the U.S. Capitol. She started shaking.

At that moment, there were roughly 4,500 private and commercial aircraft flying above the U.S. Few had any idea what was happening. Pilots were told little, except for an unprecedented order from federal aviation authorities: Ground every single plane now.

Most international flights were directed to Canada, with many landing in Halifax, Vancouver, and the small, remote town of Gander, Newfoundland, an experience made famous by the 2013 musical “Come From Away.”

Domestic flights returned to their points of departure or were directed to major hubs. Airports across America, especially in the center of the country, were flooded with thousands of unexpected passengers.

An air traffic controller directed Joe Spencer, the pilot of Dwyer’s plane, to a narrow strip of tarmac 20 miles away. Confused, Spencer asked to push on to Denver. Descend immediately, came the reply.

His copilot turned to him and mentioned something about explosions on the East Coast. Spencer pictured mushroom clouds.

“It was not the smoothest landing I ever made.”

The airport in Garden City, Kansas, was designed for small regional planes, the kind with propellers. But it had the only control tower for a 200-mile radius.

Two other jets were already on the tarmac. The airport had no way to get passengers off planes that big. Firefighters arrived with a ladder truck.

Across town at police headquarters, Chief James Hawkins felt queasy.

“Our tiny little law enforcement brains were going, if this was a terrorist thing, who are these people?”

SWAT was called in. Airline employees started removing anything that could be used as a weapon, including a box filled with metal utensils.

Dwyer looked out of the plane. Federal law enforcement officers had arrived. Police dogs were sniffing luggage on the tarmac.

Once the pilot gave passengers the OK to use their cellphones, details of the attacks filtered through the cabin.

Dwyer’s mind flew to Danielle Kousoulis, her college roommate and rowing teammate, who had always dreamed of living in New York City. Her new boyfriend in tow, Kousoulis had visited California a few weeks prior, meeting up with Dwyer and another friend for a beach day and a baseball game.

Kousoulis worked as a vice president at the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, on the 104th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

From the tarmac at Garden City, Dwyer finally got hold of a friend.

“We’ve been attacked,” the friend said. “The World Trade Centers are gone.”

“What do you mean they’re gone?” Dwyer said.

The plane sat there for hours. The 78 passengers had little idea of where they were — and where they would be taken.

Airline employees across the United States and Canada were scrambling to find lodging for thousands of stranded passengers. Many wound up in people’s homes. Some stayed on cruise ships in the Port of Vancouver. About 100 Israelis were whisked to Camp Hiawatha, a Salvation Army facility outside of Wichita.

At the US Airways office in Garden City, station manager Leslie Henry Riederer was on the phone all morning. She knew there weren’t enough hotel rooms in town. She called Jill Mitchell, the station manager in Dodge City.

They agreed it didn’t feel right to separate the passengers. They might need each other.

“Leslie and I were both moms,” she said. “Even though we didn’t know these people, that ‘mama bear’ protective nature just kicked in.”

Someone found an old staircase at the airport. It had been specially made decades earlier when President Dwight Eisenhower visited. It still wasn’t tall enough. The firefighters put a stepladder on top.

By the time Dwyer clambered down and her feet touched solid ground, buses from Dodge City Community College were waiting for them at the airport.

Mitchell and Riederer greeted them in the terminal. They could see the grief in their faces. They resisted the urge to hug these strangers, for now.

The passengers stepped off the bus in the parking lot of the rustic Dodge House Hotel and Saloon, on the edge of what was once “the Wickedest Little City in the West.”

Gamblers, murderers and prostitutes ran rampant during the late 1800s. The radio drama and TV show “Gunsmoke” titillated audiences across the country decades later with tales inspired by the outlaws and gunslingers here.

Dwyer checked into her room. She found herself staring at the TV, calling friends and family.

News came in fragments. It would take time to piece all of them together. The most important detail was soon confirmed. Kousoulis had gone to work that day. When Dwyer stepped into the shower and the water hit her skin, she sobbed.

“I felt that I knew then,” Dwyer said. “Who could survive that?”

Later, passengers gathered for dinner at the hotel saloon, a place that inspired Toby Keith to write his 1993 hit “Should’ve Been a Cowboy.”

They had hours to kill. Music was playing. Libations were at hand. It was karaoke night. Someone grabbed the mic, and the night took a surreal turn.

At one point, a group sang “New York, New York,” as a tribute of sorts, Beth Fish, a passenger, recalled. She paused, thinking back on it.

“It was so weird.”

By the next morning, civic leaders in Dodge City had assembled a full itinerary. The Boot Hill Museum rounded up actors for an impromptu gunfight. The trolley bus took passengers to Walmart. The community college set up a computer lab and phone bank. The cosmetology department offered free manicures.

“No one said no to anything we asked,” Mitchell said.

As the sun set that evening, the buses pulled up to a massive-looking barn on the outskirts of town.

Shelby Marchel had insisted that the passengers come for her family’s chuck wagon dinner and Wild West show. For a Christian woman like Marchel, welcoming strangers was never a choice, her daughters said.

Inside one of the largest indoor arenas in the state of Kansas, volunteers wearing leather boots, cowboy hats and sheriff’s badges escorted them to picnic tables.

It was a “little bit cheesy,” said Bonita McClure, a member of “The Drovers.”

“We were just glad to be able to do anything we could.”

Liz Wetmore and her husband, Bob, who had helped organize Dodge City’s response, set heaping plates of steak dinners in front of the passengers. As Wetmore moved from passenger to passenger, she squeezed shoulders gently. She saw their relief — and guilt — at being alive.

Watching them pick at their food, Wetmore registered the vacant stares.

But the more they ate, the more they talked. The voices became boisterous. Soon, the Wetmores heard laughter.

Later that night, buffalo and longhorn steers would rumble across the dirt floor. A narrator would tell the history of the Old West. Performers on horseback would rope calves. In between, musicians sang songs and played the guitar or fiddle.

First came the national anthem.

That song — “The Star-Spangled Banner” — was written in Baltimore during the War of 1812 when the city was under siege. But the version performed in Dodge City on Sept. 12, 2001, was not one the passengers had heard before.

It was one of the Marchel sisters’ signature songs, a difficult arrangement crafted by their mother, Shelby, years prior. She wrote it by hand at an upright piano in the living room of their double-wide trailer.

The oldest sister, Kandee, 21, took the low part. Eighteen-year-old Mindy had the melody. Samantha, 16, was left grasping at the high notes. Toggling between major and minor keys, the song went from mournful to hopeful to powerful and defiant.

Near the very end, the sisters briefly paused. In the audience, passengers, US Airways staff and Dodge City residents stood spellbound. Dwyer and many others had tears in their eyes. Some held hands. The sisters took a deep breath, prepared for one final key change and belted out the final word, “brave.”

The third day, about half of the passengers boarded a chartered bus bound for BWI, a ride that would take about 24 hours.

Before leaving, Bobby Levine, a Baltimore businessperson, placed an ad in the Dodge City Daily Globe. It was a letter, written on behalf of all the stranded passengers. He thanked the residents for showering them with kindness “in the middle of so much pain.”

“In a way, I feel a little guilty,” he wrote.

If anyone reading this ever found themselves in Baltimore, the note said, they should contact Levine so he could repay the favor.

Dwyer and the remaining passengers, now numbering roughly 30 people, went to the Garden City airport to resume the journey to Los Angeles. Inside the terminal, they found Mitchell and Riederer, ready for hugs.

The two women had hidden their emotions all week. Now they could cry.

A hundred or more onlookers pressed up against the fence outside the airport. There had been something unnerving about looking up and seeing nothing but blue for three straight days — not a single jet contrail.

Allen Shelton, the Garden City fire chief, stood on the tarmac. He had taken all three pilots golfing the day before. He watched the plane sprint down the tarmac and judder into the sky. He waved goodbye.

“It was like seeing a good friend leaving,” Shelton said.

On Dwyer’s first day back at work in California, her supervisor didn’t ask about the flight, the diversion to Dodge City or even her dead friend. The supervisor launched into a series of complaints about note-taking.

“I screamed at her,” Dwyer said. “I cursed, I think, and just left.”

In the weeks and months after 9/11, Dwyer spent little time thinking of Dodge City. She was too focused on Kousoulis, the friend who took the mic and sang “Copacabana” at weddings. She had always imagined attending Kousoulis’ own wedding one day and meeting her children.

Instead, she attended her memorial service in New Jersey. There was nothing to bury.

Later, with her friends from Villanova University, Dwyer set up a nonprofit and scholarship fund in honor of Kousoulis.

For a while, passengers wrote letters to Mitchell with life updates, she said, but those exchanges petered out over time. She later moved to Texas.

Riederer held onto a box of mementos. More than a dozen passengers wrote to thank her and Mitchell. One man sent a letter to the governor of Kansas and gave the two women an “extra special” shoutout. Some messages read almost like childhood memories of summer camp.

“I wish we could bring everyone together,” Riederer said recently. She asked that this story note that she now lives in Pinehurst, North Carolina, in case any passengers want to reconnect.

As the years passed, Dwyer moved back to Maryland, settling in Baltimore. She always carried the kindness of Dodge City within her, even if she had trouble naming this gift — or even thinking about it.

But in the last year or two, her grief evolved. The clouds that had shadowed her memories began to clear. She could see Dodge City from afar.

Dwyer felt a debt of gratitude.

July brought unexpected news. At a funeral for Kousoulis’ father in New Jersey, Dwyer learned that two bone shards pulled from the rubble of Ground Zero had been identified years earlier. It was Kousoulis.

George Kousoulis had never gotten over his daughter’s death. The shards, about 3 to 6 inches long, were wrapped in a blanket and placed in the casket next to his hip. This way, she could always be by his side.

All these years, Dwyer had never returned to Dodge City. On Friday at 7 p.m., she will be at the town’s annual 9/11 memorial service.

Standing next to a piece of steel recovered from Ground Zero, she will grieve for Danielle Kousoulis.

But Dwyer is also ready to feel joy. To laugh. To cry. To give thanks. To remember how the hotel restaurant was so careful about her corn allergy. Or the US Airways staffer who pulled her aside to give out her home phone number. Or the passenger who knocked on her door to make sure she wasn’t eating alone.

She will hear the national anthem and remember how they felt that night in the arena. No longer strangers, but neighbors who had come from the sky.