Citrus Bowl: 91-year-old Gopher fan wouldn't miss it

The University of Minnesota football team has had a lot of highs and lows in its long history, and 91-year-old fan Andy Dyrdal has many of them seared in his memory.

A questionable call in the 1963 loss to Wisconsin still stings, for example, he told the Star Tribune.

“Some things just stick with you,” the Albert Lea man told the newspaper.

So when the Gophers play the No. 16 Missouri Tigers in the Citrus Bowl Thursday afternoon, Dyrdal is hoping for a far more positive outcome.

Dyrdal has been a fan or eight decades – since he was an 11-year-old, holding a radio to his ear to pick up the faint sounds of a game broadcast – and he'll be in the stands in Orlando Citrus Bowl Stadium for the noon kickoff. He made the trip with son Tom, grandson Andrew and Andrew’s pregnant wife Rachel, Dyrdal told reporters.

“It’ll be nice,” son Tom told WCCO. “We were talking about having four generations at the game.”

Dyrdal clearly remembers the last time the Gophers played on New Year's Day, in 1962, a win over UCLA in the Rose Bowl. It was among hundreds of games he attended over the decades with his late wife LoAnn.

Dyrdal is predicting a Gopher victory over Missouri, WCCO reports.