I am chuckling too because I lived in the Cities for 2-1/2 years and I do know how relative such concepts are! I often walked to the U on winter morns and returned late on winter nites at temps literally at -30 deg F when my beard was frozen with vapor from breathing.
To call several hours below 32 deg F a hard freeze does, by comparison, seem pretty weak! But when it gets in the mid to low twenties for a nite or two once every couple of years or so, it really does come as a shock by comparison to the normal lows of the mid 30's.
Architecturally, we are not set up for the "hard freezes", and they do damage that you never see in MN even at -50 deg. Poor preparations and planning and code development on our part.