College football fans crowded into Boyd Field on Nov. 16, 1918, to watch the Sooners take on Arkansas.
“The fans, so long denied of their favorite winter sport, will turn out in full force to cheer the Sooners to victory,” The Daily Oklahoman printed that day.
The day marked one of the biggest milestones in an odd 1918 college football season that was imperiled by World War I and then ravaged by the Spanish influenza pandemic that struck the country that fall.
More than a century ago, as now, there was plenty of uncertainty over the future of college football but the game wound up being part of a uniting force both as restrictions were lifted following a litany of closures and cancellations in the wake of the pandemic, and as Americans celebrated the end of the war.