Montana is celebrating 40 years of Washington-Grizzly Stadium on Saturday. It's a place that is so immeasurably special to so many of us that it's hard to put into words. But I thought
@Bwahlberg did a pretty good job on the
@GrizFanPod Sunday night:
"I think it's maybe a little understated, that the construction of Washington-Grizzly Stadium was the pivotal moment, the turn of Grizzly football into what we celebrate today. Grizzlies in the '60s and '70s and early '80s were not that great. We'd have a couple of good seasons, they'd do a few good things, but they were NAU, they were Cal Poly, they were Weber. You'd have a few goods, you'd have a few bad. It was just here, there, everywhere.
And then Washington-Grizzly Stadium changed the trajectory of
FCS Division 1-AA football, Montana Grizzlies football -- and tangentially, maybe, Montana State football as well, too. And others, because that was then the goal to chase.
I think a lot of us, especially that grew up here in Missoula, you have so many memories in that stadium sitting in the grass end zones, building snowman in the playoff games in the '90s in the end zones and doing those things like that. And then watching the expansion, seeing the stadium grow. Then seeing it on national television. Or the first time you remember when ESPN did a night game in 2004 against New Hampshire and they brought in lights and you would go with your parents to go look at the lights -- like, holy shit, the stadium has lights!
I've never seen this before.
There's just so many things that it's just like iconic about what this stadium means. In the fandom, in, in the legacy of being a Griz fan in this era that no one talks about Dornblaser or other old stadiums with such like loving memory that, that put, put your team at the at the place it is now.
So it is, it is really, really fun to just think about and celebrate and support a little bit of an older girl that needs a little bit of a facelift that's had so many amazing moments and events that have happened in that stadium for so many Griz fans. Not a lot of fan bases, especially at the FCS, 1-AA level, have that many memories that you can collect in one single spot."