It is with some sadness and admiration that we start the day with news of the apparent demise of the Arena Football League. It’s sad because the AFL really seemed to have turned a corner and established itself for many years; and, at the same time, admiration that an unaffiliated minor league football operation could grow and expand to the point that it lasted for 22 years.

We tend to embrace minor league sports because of the mixed bag crowd, the strange promotions and the colorful characters that try to make it work. These types of enterprises are operated by folks on the fringes — dreamers, up-and-comers, has-beens and never-weres.

The Minnesota Fighting Pike, for instance, played one season in the Arena Football League (1996), but from the sounds of it things were memorable. We attended exactly one game (though we don’t remember much). Writing about the Pike 10 years after its first game in 2006, we chronicled some of the dysfunction.

The first sign of disarray came early. Art Haege, hired to be the Pike’s head coach, resigned one day after watching tryouts. “He just walked out,” owner Tom Scallen said at the time. “I said, `Where are you going? He said, `Back to Iowa.’ … I said, `Call me in the morning, OK?’ Instead, he sent me a fax that he was resigning.”

On the field, the team won its first game on the road at Texas, then made its Target Center debut with a loss to Iowa - which had future NFL MVP Kurt Warner at quarterback - before nearly 15,000 fans. That would be about as good as things got. The loss to the Barnstormers was the first of eight consecutive defeats, and home attendance never again topped 9,000. “Organization-wise, it was pretty much the first year for everybody,” former QB Rickey Foggie said. “The front office was mostly run by interns. Looking back on it now, that’s not a very good thing.” Scallen liquidated the team, and creditors were stuck with more than $200,000 in unpaid bills from the team. Scallen himself said he lost about $400,000.

That was before the AFL turned the corner financially. Franchise values went way up, an offshoot league (AFL2) started, and business was good. While we don’t know the exact details of the league’s eventual downfall, we have to imagine it’s related to the bad economy and specifically the lack of sponsorship revenue. Arena Football isn’t something we can’t live without. It’s not bread or water. But it is too bad.

Questions: Where does the Arena Football League rank in terms of success among unaffiliated minor leagues? What was your favorite Fighting Pike memory? If you could bring back one former Minnesota professional team, what would it be? Did you know that every time a minor sport dies, Marthaler dies a little too?

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