Apple Cup Game Daily 2020 Section B

GAME DAILY The greatest setting in college football turns 100

‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder’ By Nick Mendro The Daily Just like anyone who has celebrated a birthday in 2020, Husky Stadium — otherwise known as Alaska Airlines Arena — won’t get much fanfare this fall, even on its 100th birthday celebration. “Sure, we were all very much looking forward to the centennial,” UW associate athletics director (and former reporter at The Daily) Chip Lydum said. “But absence makes the heart grow fonder. [The stadium] has kind of a depth and a legacy that it’s going to last. It’s not just Johnny-comelately or flavor of the month. It’s very much steeped in a history that’s deeper.” Much of the lore of Husky Stadium, for both its own

members and those of opposing teams, stems from its aesthetic appeal. Rising majestically from the shores of Lake Washington, the stadium stands as unerasably as the Cascade Mountains, a sturdy final destination at the bottom of the gentle stroll through the downhill sprawl of UW campus buildings on brisk Saturday evenings. “It’s so unique, right on the water, with this big canyon of a roof,” UW director of community and external relations Damon Huard said. “Every time you drive over 520, you see the jaws. It’s just a part of the fabric of this community.” Unlike every other autumn of the past century, though, the traffic over Highway 520 on Saturdays for the past two

months has been eerily scarce. Even Husky Stadium — immune to the turbulence of a partial building collapse, a world war, and former President Warren G. Harding’s final public speech before his death

just days later — couldn’t evade the suffocating grasp of the coronavirus pandemic. Sure, leaves still blanket the blacktop of the Burke-Gilman trail just a few hundred feet from the doors of the open-air arena

“it’s about the band, the fans, tailgating, the entire experience that you don’t get in pro football. It doesn’t feel corporate.” - Damon Huard

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— a gateway usually blown open by a purple-and-gold tidal wave of sheer sonic volume after a weekend of tailgating. Continued on page 2

Elijah Pasco @the_campus_sketcher