On Thursday night, the lights at Legends Stadium will come up on two things at once: a football game that has divided Kalispell for nearly two decades, and a ceremony honoring a man who left the valley long ago but never really left it behind.
Dylan McFarland, a 1999 graduate of Flathead High School, will become the latest Brave enshrined on the Legends Wall of Fame during the annual crosstown matchup between the Flathead Braves and the Glacier High School Wolfpack. Kickoff is scheduled for 7 p.m. at the stadium both programs share, at the corner of 12th Street West and 4th Avenue West.
The Wall of Fame is a relatively recent addition to a very old place. The stadium itself dates to the early 1900s — the first high school football team in Flathead County played there in 1904 — and by the 1940s it had become one of the state's finest athletic complexes. It nearly disappeared in 1952, when the field fell into disrepair and the school board weighed moving it to the county fairgrounds or an empty lot south of the Dry Bridge. The community objected loudly enough to keep it in its neighborhood setting in the heart of town. For decades it was known as Rawson Memorial Field, in honor of former Flathead principal Kenneth Rawson, before a 1977 upgrade brought new lights and practice fields. In 2004, the school board renamed the complex Legends Stadium to honor the students, teachers, coaches and administrators who had built its tradition. A synthetic turf field replaced the old crowned grass surface in 2017.
The Wall of Fame followed from that same impulse — a selection committee that reviews nominations and weighs community service, leadership, academics and athletic accomplishment in Kalispell's schools. Inductees have ranged from championship coaches to the athletes they trained. When Jim Kola and Brent Wilson were inducted in 2017, they joined 28 other names already on the wall. McFarland now adds his.
His résumé is the kind that makes a small-town wall worth reading. In the late 1990s he started at both offensive and defensive tackle for the Braves as a junior and senior, earning Class AA first-team All-State honors as a junior and second-team as a senior — the latter despite missing six games with a broken foot. He captained the team his senior year and played in both the 2000 Montana/Dakota All Star Game and the 2000 Montana Shrine Game. He was no specialist, either: a two-year starter for Braves basketball, he was second-team All-State as a senior and led the state in rebounding. He graduated with a perfect 4.0 GPA, was named class valedictorian, and sang in concert choir and the Glacier Orchestra & Chorale.
Recruited by Northwestern, Harvard, Purdue, Oregon State and Montana State, McFarland chose to stay close to the Flathead Valley and play for the University of Montana. In Missoula he started four years at left tackle, was an All-American in 2002 and 2003, captained the Grizzlies in 2003, and played in two FCS national championship games — winning the title in 2001. He was a four-time Academic All-Big Sky selection and a 2003 semifinalist for the William V. Campbell Trophy, the award often called the nation's Academic Heisman. In 2024 he was inducted into the Grizzly Sports Hall of Fame, one of four Montana legends honored that year.
The Buffalo Bills drafted him in the seventh round in 2004. Over the next three years he moved between the Bills' practice squad and game roster, and spent a stint with NFL Europe's Hamburg Sea Devils in 2006. A series of knee surgeries ended his playing career after Europe. He earned his law degree at the University of Montana and now practices law in Missoula, where he chairs the Missoula YMCA board and works with the GrizKidz program.
The game he'll help open is the younger of Kalispell's two great sporting traditions, but it has grown into the bigger one. Glacier High School opened in 2007, and the two schools met on the gridiron for the first time on Oct. 12 of that year — the Braves at 4-3, the brand-new Wolfpack at 0-7 — under the lights at Legends. In the years since, the rivalry has been played for the "Black and Blue Trophy," with one end zone painted orange and black for Flathead and the other blue and green for Glacier. In a normal year, well over 3,000 spectators cram into the stadium and crowd the sidelines, cheers and taunts carrying for blocks in every direction.
The series has been lopsided of late. Glacier holds the overall edge, and the Wolfpack have won most of the recent meetings, including a 42-0 shutout in 2020 — the first shutout in series history — and a 49-14 rout in which quarterback Gage Sliter threw five first-half touchdown passes. This year's Glacier squad arrives at 6-1 overall and 5-0 in Western AA play, the defending Class AA state champions, having opened the season with a 6-3 loss to Billings West in a rematch of last season's title game before outscoring opponents 271-23. The Wolfpack began the year with a 7.5-game streak without allowing a touchdown, a run finally broken by Missoula Sentinel earlier this month.
Flathead comes in from the other direction, sitting near the bottom of the Western AA standings at 1-4 in conference and 3-4 overall. The season began in historic fashion — a 3-0 start in which the Braves outscored opponents 124-59 — before a four-game skid set in. Two of those losses came by a combined four points; two, including last week's meeting with Butte, were blowouts. The Braves are playing to keep their playoff hopes alive.
That's the kind of mismatch that, on paper, would make a Thursday night in October forgettable. It's also the kind that the crosstown game has a way of erasing. As Glacier coach Grady Bennett put it before a previous installment, "It's crosstown, and anything can happen. It doesn't matter what record we're up against, we have to treat this game differently."
Before any of that, though, there's the wall. A 1904 field, a 1952 fight to save it, a 2004 renaming, and now a lawyer from Missoula who once blocked for the Grizzlies and will watch his name go up alongside the coaches and athletes who came before him. Then the lights, the two end zones, and the town split down the middle again.