McFeely: Raucous home crowd packs the SHAC at last as Bison down UND

Forget the score. The home team won, yes. North Dakota State beat rival North Dakota 73-68 in an important Summit League men's basketball game.

But the story was the crowd.

Yes, the story of the day as it relates to an NDSU basketball game was the crowd. How about that?

There were 5,058 fans inside the Sanford Health Athletic Complex on Saturday afternoon, about 5,000 of whom were Bison fans.

The SHAC was packed.

They were engaged. They were loud. The beer was flowing. They were doing the wave. They were chanting, "Let's go Bison!"

They were chanting, "(Offensive nickname no longer used by UND) suck (expletive)!"

Dare we say it was raucous.

It was like the good old days when people in Fargo-Moorhead cared about NDSU basketball and packed the late ... um ... great Bison Sports Arena.

"They really brought it today," said Bison guard Boden Skunberg.

Take a bow, Bison fans. You showed up and, as they kids say, showed out.

My guy Dom Izzo of WDAY-TV and I will take some credit. We've been pushing for the last couple of weeks to get 5,000 fans to the Bison men's and women's games Saturday. Our Drive for Five (Thousand). Why not? It seems like nobody in the NDSU athletic department was trying all that hard.

Prior to Saturday, the Bison were ranked sixth in the conference in attendance. Sixth. Unacceptable.

It's obviously easier to get fans to show up for a game against a rival that happened to be in first place, but NDSU hadn't drawn a crowd of 5,000 to a home game since 2017. Last year's UND game drew 3,800. Unacceptable.

"It was great," Bison coach Dave Richman said of the atmosphere. "I just found myself probably last five minutes just sitting back and letting the kids hear the crowd. To have a nationally televised game and to get this kind of exposure like that, to see what we have here in a facility and a product and a brand and support. It was a great Saturday afternoon of basketball for North Dakota State basketball."

That the Bison won the game helped if they expect some return customers. NDSU's other, bigger rival in the Division I era, South Dakota State, comes to Fargo on March 2 to wrap up the regular season.

In the results department the Bison were helped by UND coach Paul Sather, who got a technical foul with 6:16 left in the second half and his team leading by 7 points. Why? The game felt like it was getting away from the Bison and Sather threw them a lifeline.

And they grabbed it.

Andrew Morgan's spin and dunk brought the crowd to its feet a couple of minutes later and when the big man nailed a 3-pointer from the right wing to give NDSU a 62-61 lead with 5:02 left, the raucous fans just about brought down the roof. Sather was forced to call a timeout, which only served to get the fans even more frenzied.

Biggest drawback of the day: After a thrilling win and a crowd that was juiced to the gills to keep the party going, NDSU cleared the arena and made fans come back in for the women's game. They all didn't come back. Stupid. Unacceptable.

But we won't let that detract from a wonderful, loud, how-fun-was-that afternoon of hoops. NDSU can't make every home game as special as this one was, but there are opportunities to pack the house and bring the thunder.

Kudos to the fans for doing it.

Free advice, NDSU: You might want to think of ways to get 5,000 more in the place when the Jackrabbits come to town. It can be done, as Saturday proved.