It's July 2025, and HailToPurple.com has been online for 25 years. I never thought this fan site would last so long—heck, I didn't think that an old HTML webpage would still be viable this far into the twenty-first century, but here we are, and here it is. Granted, it's hobbling along now on a wing and a prayer: I rarely update it anymore, every one of the site's guest writers has gone on to bigger and better things, and technology and internet improvements have rendered quite a lot of the site inaccessible or unreadable now. But HTP is still around for a bit longer, and I'm still having fun with it.

When the site first posted on July 12, 2000, on the old AOL Hometown space, I'd been lurking around the college football sites and message boards for over a decade, starting with the old alt.collegefootball newsgroup and fans posting their opinions of Francis Peay's latest recruits for NU. By early 1995, just in time for Gary Barnett's turnaround, we saw the first NU fan websites pop up on the new World Wide Web. Two years later, I decided to try my hand at a fan site. I had some photographs that I'd taken of the renovation work being done to Dyche Stadium, and I wanted to share them online. But my day job intervened, and I put off starting the site. Months piled up, and it would be three years before I dusted off the idea, learned HTML, and put the site online using a 28k phone modem.

Other sites came and went, technology and formatting improved, and HailToPurple became something of a relic. I decided to see how long I could keep the site up, using the same tech that I started with. While HTP is no longer on AOL or uploaded via a phone line, it is still updated using Netscape Composer software from the late 1990s. It's the equivalent of pedaling a pennyfarthing bicycle around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway—fun, but a bit pointless.

Tech has changed, and so has college football and Northwestern Athletics. The Big Ten has gone from eleven to eighteen teams, Dyche Stadium / Ryan Field is no more, the NU football program is a radically different entity, and the transfer portal and NIL changes have transformed everything beyond recognition. But NU still represents the best of what college athletics aspires to be, the program's history is still as intriguing and mysterious as ever, and it's as entertaining as ever to cheer for the 'Cats.

So, what does HTP's future look like? Well, not another 25 years, that's for sure. The site has primarily served as my way to research and discuss the history of Northwestern Football. One big milestone for that research came on the site's fifth anniversary, when Arcadia Publishing released my book Northwestern Wildcat Football, a brief overview of the team's history. In some ways, HTP's climax happened two years ago, with the release of Gus Hornsby's Gamble, my book describing the 1876 origin of the team. Since then, HTP has entered its coda, the brief wind-down period. Again, the updates come less frequently now, and the site becomes a bit more inscrutable as its technology phases out, but it's still my pleasure to share snippets of Wildcat history and fun. I can't thank you enough for taking the ride with me.

Go 'Cats!