It rose from the rubble of a dump, a bold statement in a city longing for the big leagues.

And for half a century, through five incarnations, it represented Denver's pride, a mass of concrete and steel and memories standing sturdy west of downtown.

Mile High Stadium.

It saw more than 3,000 baseball games and more than 300 football games. It hosted rock stars and religious revivals, a prize fighter and a pope.

And soon it will be gone, reduced to rubble by a wrecking ball, a victim of the passing years and a changing climate.

"Everything has its time," said Floyd Little, who spent nine seasons dazzling fans and confounding defenders on its turf.

Friday marks the last regular-season game. Mile High's time is about up.

What a ride it's been.

These days, any talk about Mile High Stadium generally starts and ends with the Denver Broncos.

But before the Broncos, there were the Bears.

And before it was Mile High Stadium, it was Bears Stadium.

It was the fall of 1947.

Bob Howsam, his brother, Earl, and their father, Lee, bought the Denver Bears, the city's beloved minor league baseball team.

In those days, the Bears called Merchants Park home.

The old ballpark on South Broadway and Center Avenue was falling apart. Splinters were common on its green wooden plank bleachers. Some feared it was a fire trap.

"When we bought the ballclub, we knew we'd have to build a new stadium," said Bob Howsam, now 82 and splitting time between Glenwood Springs and Sun City, Ariz.

Denver's mayoral election earlier that year had set the stage.

The incumbent, Ben Stapleton, wanted a new stadium for the team, and he promised anyone willing to build it a great deal — 15 acres of land on the west side for $1.

The land, situated along the east side of Federal Boulevard, had been the city's dump for years.

Stapleton, however, lost. The new mayor, Quigg Newton, charged the Howsams $33,000.

Soon, people heading up and down Federal saw tractors moving dirt. They saw concrete mixers churning out slurry to form the terraces that would hold the seats.

And two boys who lived in West Denver near Sloan's Lake often walked over to the ball field taking shape, watching men transform an old dump into a playground for grownups.

Then the boys — Ronnie Bill and his brother, Joe — headed home, building their own ball field in the backyard sandbox, using mud for concrete and Popsicle sticks for girders.

Ronnie, not yet 10 as Bears Stadium was taking shape, couldn't have imagined the role that structure would play in his life.

For the Howsams, the investment was huge. They guaranteed $250,000 in bonds and put up their own money for some of the construction.

On Aug. 14, 1948, Bears Stadium opened. The Howsams christened their new ballpark with a 9-5 win over the Sioux City Soos before 10,884 paying fans.

It was the largest crowd ever to see a baseball game in Denver.

"Bears Stadium when it was built was considered a showplace around the country, and in minor league baseball it was way ahead of anything at that time," Howsam said.

It featured an elevated press box, supported by two concrete pillers, above the seats behind home plate. Beneath the press box sat the organist.

General admission tickets went for 90 cents, and for $1.25 a fan could recline on a folding chair in one of the box seats that lined the field. Ushers wore yellow jackets and dark slacks.

The stadium then consisted of what is now the first level of the west and north stands.

A clubhouse stood where the South Stands are Friday. And a colorful fence circled the outfield, adorned with hand-painted ads for Elitch Gardens and Eddie Bohn's Pig 'n Whistle restaurant and motel.

Leo Gordon painted the advertisements.

"His job was to come out every spring and start painting," said Charles Spivak of Cockeysville, Md. Gordon was his grandfather, and on weekends Spivak and his sister, Lynn, would go to the ballpark and watch him work.

"We had the run of the place," Spivak, 56, said. "Nobody was there. We would take our baseball and gloves and pretend we were Denver Bears."

Sometimes, Gordon would take box seat tickets instead of cash for his payment.

And sometimes he'd take his grandchildren to the game, where they'd sit on the folding chairs, a small fence the only thing separating them from the players.

"You felt like you were practically in the game," Spivak said.

And what a game it was.

Through the 1950s, the Bears — a Yankees farm team — featured future major leaguers "Marvelous" Marv Throneberry, Tony Kubek and Bobby Richardson. And a left-handed pitcher named Tom Lasorda, who came to town in 1956 after being traded to the Yankees.

"I remember the first time I pitched there," said Lasorda, who went on to lead the Los Angeles Dodgers to two World Series titles. "I'll never forget that if I live to be a hundred."

He got into town in the afternoon, read a newspaper story about the sorry state of Bears pitching, headed to the ballpark and talked manager Ralph Houk into putting him on the mound that night.

"I got in the game," Lasorda said. "I couldn't breathe. Everything I threw up there they hit like rockets. I got banged around so bad I was completely embarrassed. My curve ball wouldn't work."

After one inning, he'd given up five runs. He figured he'd worked the kinks out, only to return in the second and watch the same horror unfold.

Still, Lasorda's memories of Denver are fond ones.

"In those days, that was a beautiful ballpark," he said.

Ronnie Bill, the young boy who'd built ballparks in his sandbox, had gone to work for the Bears in 1953 as a ball boy and scoreboard operator, a job arranged by a friend after the teen-ager's father died.

He thinks back now to a Yankees exhibition game played there, to the day he met Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris and Whitey Ford. That day his mother cooked a dozen chickens, and made baked beans and potato salad for the visiting heroes.

It didn't last long.

"Whew," he said, thinking back, "it was gone."

As much fun as the Bears had, and as much as the town supported the team, Denver leaders dreamed of attracting a major league team.

When it became clear Denver wouldn't get one, the Howsams embraced the newly formed Continental Baseball League.

To that end, they tore down the old clubhouse and built the south stands.

But the Continental League died before it took its first step.

It was another league, however, that would change Bears Stadium — and Denver — in ways nobody could imagine.

It was 1959. Howsam made a bid to bring a National Football League team to Denver.

But George Halas, owner of the Chicago Bears and the most powerful man in the league, wouldn't give Denver a team.

So Howsam and four others launched the American Football League.

Denver's ragtag team, the Broncos, moved into Bears Stadium for the league's inaugural season, 1960, adorned with mustard and brown uniforms and vertically striped socks purchased at bargain-basement prices from a defunct college all-star game.

In those early days, a seat was easily had.

Through the 1960s, the Broncos and Bears shared the stadium. Twice, the Broncos played at the University of Denver while the baseball team finished its season. And each fall, workers built temporary bleachers along the east side of the field.

By the mid-1960s, city leaders talked openly of building a new, state-of-the-art sports complex for its baseball and football teams.

For, even as the Broncos bumbled their way through their first years — their first eight seasons produced 27 wins against 80 losses and two ties — they built a following that remains legendary four decades later. And the Bears continued to draw fans, though not at the clip they had.

In 1967, changes loomed for the Broncos and the stadium.

Floyd Little, a star running back out of Syracuse, became the first first-round draft choice to sign with the team.

But that fall, voters turned down a bond issue to build a new stadium and the city nearly lost the team. However, a civic group raised $1.8 million to buy the stadium. It presented the sports complex to the city in February 1968.

A 16,000-seat upper deck was built over the west stands, raising the stadium's capacity to more than 50,000 for the 1968 season.

On Dec. 14, at the last regular season game of the year, the building got a new name: Mile High Stadium. The civic leaders suggested it, intent on a sweeping, multi-sport name that pushed Denver into the big leagues.

But while coach Lou Saban was putting in place a professional organization, some of the goings on at the growing ball field were downright bizarre.

There was the "half-a-loaf" game, when Saban went for a tie instead of a win. Afterward, he defended the move, saying "half a loaf" was better than nothing. For weeks afterward, fans bombed the field with half loaves of bread.

There was the game in 1968 when Saban "fired" Little. The volatile coach ordered his second-year running back to hit the bricks. Right in the middle of a game.

"He told me the Valley Highway went north and south and I-70 went east and west and I had better be on one of them," Little recalled.

Little headed to the locker room, got mad, went back on the field and caught a pass that set up the winning field goal.

"Come here, come here," Saban screamed afterward.

Little did.

"You've got one more week," the coach told him.

One more week turned into seven more years, a rushing title, the Broncos' first winning season, and the adulation of a city.

But as Little thinks back, he remembers more than the games and the glory.

He remembers early mornings in the late spring and early summer, slipping through a gate at the stadium with Nemiah Wilson, a defensive back for the Raiders. The two friends would lace up their combat boots and go to work, running up the bleachers in the south stands.

It's been 25 years since Little hung up his cleats. He lives in Seattle now, but he'll never forget those grueling south stands sprints, which often left him on his hands and knees throwing up.

"There's 56 seats and 112 steps," he said.

By the mid-1970s, the team and the stadium were on the move again.

An expansion between 1975 and 1977 raised seating capacity to more than 75,000. It featured an ingenious, 9 million-pound east stands that can be moved back and forth on a track of water, close in for football, further back for baseball.

And in 1977, in one magical season, the Broncos realized the hopes of a city, winning 12 games, edging the hated Raiders in the conference championship game and making the first of six trips to the Super Bowl.

It was an amazing time.

Tom Jackson, a Broncos' linebacker from 1973 to 1986 who Friday is a top broadcaster on ESPN, remembers what it was like after the games. Basking in the glow of a win, he'd head into the parking lot and hang out with fans, barbecuing and relaxing and enjoying victory over dinner in a motor home.

"It was just a very friendly, family-type atmosphere," Jackson said. "I don't know how many players Friday stop after the game to tailgate with fans."

Over the next 21 years, Mile High would host many magical games, see divison and conference champions, serve as home to the greatest comeback quarterback who ever played, John Elway, host a boxing match between the great Muhammad Ali and the Broncos' Lyle Alzado in 1979, and soar with song during Pope John Paul II's visit during World Youth Day in 1993.

And it saw plenty of incredible baseball, too.

There was the July 4, 1979, game that saw the Bears rally for nine runs in the ninth inning — eight of them after there were two outs — to beat Omaha 16-14.

By 1987, the Bears had become the Zephyrs.

On June 2, 1987, the stadium saw a shot unlike any other when the Z's Joey Meyer cranked what was and will always be the longest home run ever hit in Mile High Stadium, a 582-foot blast that ricocheted off a seat in the upper deck of the east stands. It landed in section 338, row 3, seat 9. Right above Rich Jackson's name on the Ring of Fame.

Friday, Meyer lives in Hawaii, his baseball career having ended nearly a decade ago. But he still catches Broncos games on television. And sometimes he catches Jackson's name on the facade.

"I always tell my kids that right above that sign I hit the ball," Meyer said.

And how about April 9, 1993, the day the majors finally came to town?

That day, 80,227 jammed Mile High to watch the new Colorado Rockies, led by an Eric Young leadoff home run, bash the Montreal Expos 11-4.

In 1995, the Rockies left Mile High behind and moved into their new home, Coors Field.

And soon the Broncos will follow, moving across the parking lot to their new stadium, with its club seats, luxury boxes, bigger bathrooms and wider concourses.

The wrecking balls will move in. In no time at all, old Mile High will be rubble.

It will be a mere memory.

But how do you measure its worth?

Is it in the echoes of past glories?

Is it down there on the field, at the spot where, in a crucial 1977 game, Tom Jackson stepped in front of a Bert Jones pass and raced 73 yards for a touchdown that sealed a win over the Baltimore Colts and announced to the world that yes, this team was real?

Is it up in the north-side goal posts, where Jason Elam's record-tying 63-yard field goal sailed through in 1998?

Is it up in that seat where the longest home run ever hit in Denver landed?

Is it simply because Mile High helped make Denver a big-league city?

"It served its time perfectly," said Jim Saccomano, the Broncos public relations man who was born the same year as the stadium and went to Bears games as a kid. "This stadium has seen some stuff, and this stadium helped put the city on the map."

For Tom Jackson, the old linebacker, there's the realization that nothing lasts forever.

And yet, he won't get emotional. Instead, he'll cherish the memories.

So will Saccomano.

"I think we should treat it like an Irish wake," he said. "We shouldn't mourn it, we should toast it."