Queen's Golden Gaels play last game at Richardson Stadium, a place worthy of a requiem

KINGSTON, Ont. — The past few seasons, after parts of the stands were condemned, after Rickety Richardson Stadium became its official unofficial name, the venue where the Queen's Golden Gaels played football was like that elder relative whose decline was so painful to see that you masked it by cringe-chuckling.

With the east side student section already torn down since the timeline for a stadium revitalization is the start of next season, Queen's played its last football game at the current iteration at Richardson on Saturday by losing abjectly 39-8 against the Carleton Ravens in an Ontario University Athletics quarter-final playoff game. Among the Tricolour faithful and those who follow Canadian university football closely, the collective attitude is good riddance, a near sound-alike for the stadium's namesake, hockey star and First World War hero George Richardson, whose legacy surely rates better.

The 44-year-old stadium's birth and death each attested to the baffling brilliance of bureaucracy, and perhaps a Canadian higher-education system where sports' importance should not exceed the greater good. In the late 1960s, when baby boomers were hitting university age, Queen's needed to expand and could attain funding for academic buildings and residences but not a stadium.

So the original Richardson that was packed on football Saturdays, where the crowd noise carried through downtown Kingston streets, was dismantled, with some of the original materials recycled into a stadium on the West Campus, built at the bottom of a hill. As a result, Richardson played peek-a-boo with passersby, almost metaphorical for how much of the competition in Canadian Interuniversity Sport happens far from the madding crowd.

Alumni of a certain vintage learned to live with it, but knew something had been lost. Doug Hargreaves, who coached the Gaels to Vanier Cup titles in 1978 and '92, was wont to say that given one weekend, a phone and an address book, he could raise enough money to get Richardson back on main campus. And at this end, it far outlived its useful life, with the stadium file evidently sitting ignored on someone's desk for years on end. It long since hit a point that Queen's boosters welcomed the “rickety” descriptions on the premise it might shame administration into decisive action.

Major-college programs in the U.S. might monetize everything within reach, but play football in the heart of the campus. The University of Michigan, Notre Dame or USC might expand, but they don't move. Concomitantly, to walk around the facilities at U-M in Ann Arbor, to take in the scope of Michigan Stadium, AKA the Big House, plus the adjacent basketball and hockey arenas plus baseball, softball and field hockey stadiums, is to have confirmation of John Oliver's Last Week Tonight takedown about how big-business NCAA programs get away with being not-for-profit. The contrast in Canada, where the typical football team plays in a nondescript 'stadium' with metal bleachers that might also be used by the field hockey, rugby and soccer teams, avers that a sense of modesty and proportion has been retained up here. That's not to state a preference for one or the other.

Circling back to Richardson, while its beginning and ending were ill-starred and the last natural-grass stadium in OUA failed to achieved the respectability that old buildings inevitably acquire if they last long enough, the people who inhabited it during Gaels football games gave it charm. It feels hard to explain, especially to people who are disinclined to pay attention to CIS football, why it was so special. Part of the pull, and this is the case across university sports, is that a university football team is made up of real students who care deeply about each other and one purpose, and are ready to be tough in the face of a tough job.

That concept might have been hard for, speaking from personal experience, a sports-mad introvert such as I to articulate when Queen's hooked me in during a renaissance in the late '80s and early '90s that peaked with that '92 national title. What was evident was those Gaels of Brad Elberg, Mike Boone, Tim Pendergast, Mark Robinson and others were a group that got after it. There was also something necessary about going to games in Kingston in the fall, being outdoors in a large community gathering, with the Gaels taking the field in those distinct Tricolour uniforms — gold and red for the autumn colours, blue for the sky. In an age when social dissolution was becoming a norm, where the notion of consensus was a nostalgic chimera — not that there's anything wrong with that, since diversity and progress often go hand in hand — it was soul-filling to be immersed in all that in September and October, and November if there were home playoff games. It was a focal point before the first snows flew and the city became a study in white and grey tones, all snowbanks and limestone buildings.

My abiding attachment to Queen's and its football team wasn't because of Richardson Stadium, but it  was a more than capable incubator for a lifetime obsession. The understanding that opposing teams disliked coming down Hwy. 401 to play on the grass surface only helped feed that sense of ownership. There's a sneaking suspicion that being one of the few teams with that home-field advantage factored into Queen's most recent championship run in 2009, where it won three consecutive trophy games against the programs with a combined 18 Vanier Cup titles, beating the Western Mustangs by four in the Yates Cup, the Laval Rouge et Or by three in the Mitchell Bowl and Calgary Dinos by two in the Vanier.

The microcosm of all that was late in the third quarter of that eventual 33-30 semifinal win against Laval. The favoured Rouge et Or had seized momentum and trailed by six points. A Laval drive stalled out due to a quarterback sack and an overthrown pass. Christopher Milo, the current Ottawa Redblacks kicker, came on for the long field goal.

A Queen's cornerback named Jimmy Allin went back into the end zone with hope of running out a miss. Allin was the Gaels' identity writ large in a compact package, since he was only 5-foot-8, with a face destined to get him carded at bars well into adulthood. He was a small-towner from Corbyville, Ont., near Belleville, was premed and was also Queen's best cover corner, with perhaps not a CFL-spec time in the all-important 40-yard dash, but had football quickness. Earlier that season, against the Guelph Gryphons, Allin had three special teams touchdowns in one game, so suffice to say, some Queen's students had started wearing What Would Jimmy Do t-shirts. In the press box, I leaned over to Jake Edmiston of The Queen's Journal and whispered, “If he misses this, Jimmy's going to get a big return.”

Indeed, Milo was short and wide, and Allin caught the ball and moved upfield. A missed-field goal return offers more chance for a touchdown than a punt return, since hulking linemen are doing something they weren't designed to do, making tackles downfield. Allin — and this might be some embellishment fomented from having watched the play about 561 times on YouTube — darted and dodged across the muddy field, bobbing and weaving through the Laval pursuit for a touchdown, with the noise from 8,000 throats providing wind at his back. At that point, and at times throughout a fourth quarter where the clock could not run fast enough as Laval rallied, it felt like the bleachers might give way.

It was a who-needs-fiction last hurrah. The revitalized Richardson Stadium, funded in part by a $10-million donation from Gaels alumnus and Guelph coach Stu Lang (whose team will host Carleton in an OUA semifinal on Nov. 7), is supposed to be a jewel. The architectural renderings call for a horseshoe of seating instead of two separate grandstands of benches, field turf, and eventually a pavilion to foster a welcoming atmosphere. It would probably be suitable to host a Vanier Cup. The scoreboard will even be readable under direct sunlight.

It will no doubt be well worth the wait. The memories from the place that's being torn down as we speak, though, could not be traded for one's weight in gold.

Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Follow him on Twitter @naitSAYger.