From 1979 to 1982, Northwestern lost 34 football games in a row. That is still the longest losing streak in the history of Division I football. Nobody has been worse since. Tonight, that same school opens the most expensive stadium college football has ever built. The streak ran for three years. When it finally ended on September 25, 1982, with a 31-6 win over Northern Illinois, the Chicago Tribune ran this headline. Dream come true. NU ends 34-game nightmare. Northwestern finished that season 3-8 and it felt like a parade. Now look at tonight. The new Ryan Field opens against Penn State. 875 million dollars. Privately funded. 35,000 seats. There is nothing in college football that cost more. And it opens 100 years to the day after the first one. Dyche Stadium opened on October 2, 1926. This opens on October 2, 2026. That old building stood for 98 years. It was called Dyche Stadium until 1997. They tore it down in February of 2024. The man who paid for most of it graduated from Northwestern in 1959, which means he was an alum for every single game of that 34-game streak. He sat through all of it. Pat Ryan built an insurance company called Aon and became chairman of the board of trustees. In 2021 he and his wife Shirley gave the university 480 million dollars, the largest gift in its history. Some went to medical research. Some went to this. And here is the part nobody will mention tonight. Shirley Ryan has spent 44 years on something called Pathways.org, which helps families catch movement, speech and sensory delays in babies early enough to do something about them. It now reaches more than a million American infants every year. The rehabilitation hospital in downtown Chicago is named after her. They did not just buy a stadium. Be honest about the rest. 875 million dollars for 35,000 seats is a staggering number in a sport already drowning in money, and the fight with Evanston neighbors over the project was not a friendly one. Northwestern is 3-1. This does not make them a power. One more thing, though. The Ryan family let students submit designs for a mural on the outside of the building. A junior named Avni Palsamudram won it. She is from Bangalore, India, she studies economics and data science, and she has no formal art training at all. Her mural is 15 feet tall and 80 feet wide, facing Central Street, with the Weber Arch and the Grosse Point Lighthouse and the L trains in it. She said she thinks of the place as her second home. A hundred years after the first game here, on a building that cost 875 million dollars, the first thing anybody sees is a drawing by a 20 year old who moved 8,000 miles to get here.