Tonight the Denver Broncos are playing the Oakland Raiders in Denver.

Denver is the Mile High City because that's the altitude - a mile high. There is a step going up to the state capitol building marked with a plaque indicating it is 5280 feet above sea level. The capitol is on a hill, so down toward the Platte River is Coors Field (baseball) and the row of seats that is a mile high is a different color from the other rows of seats.

I don't know if the football stadium has indicators for the mile high distinction, but the original stadium was called Mile High Stadium. It was interesting because it was used for both baseball and football. In case you don't know it, the fields are different shapes for those sports, so the east stands was designed to move back and forth. This was done by flooding channels with water and moving the whole thing as a unit.

This was before major league baseball came to Colorado, and our minor league team was the Denver Bears, and the stadium was initially built as Bears Stadium. Our major league team, the Colorado Rockies played one season at Mile High and then moved over to Coors Field.

As you can see the mile high-ness is important around here, so when a new football stadium was built and it was going to be called Invesco Field, there was an uproar. So it was "INVESCO Field at Mile High." This summer, Sports Authority bought the naming rights from Invesco, so now it's called "Sports Authority Field at Mile High."

I've often wondered what was going to happen to sports stadiums named after companies that went out of business. Invesco is still alive and kicking, so Sports Authority must have made a good offer. I haven't tracked the names of athletic venues in other cities, but there are bound to be some instances where the name has become obsolete.

Anyhow, here we are on a Monday night playing our arch-rivals the Raiders. There is a curse on the Broncos - no matter how well they are doing in a given season, they usually lose at home on Monday night, and double-whammy, no matter how crappy the Raiders' season is going, we generally lose at home to the Raiders. Not just at home, we lose to the Raiders a lot, but that makes any victory all that much sweeter.

Update: It just now started pouring rain there at Mile High field. Reminds me of a famous (in Denver anyway) Monday Night game vs the Green Bay Packers when it snowed like crazy, and we ended up with a foot of snow in town. It was the 200th Monday Night Football game, October 15, 1984.