It is like a ghostly subway station, cut off, sealed, empty, dusty, abandoned, and yet with every item, every detail still as it was. The silent hot dog and souvenir stands. The row of dark ticket windows. Inside, the yellow and blue seats, empty and faded and extending off into the vast distance, until they meet the concrete rim just below the plastic lid.
The Olympic Stadium comes to life only a few times every year, for auto shows and monster trucks and mass vaccination clinics and occasionally for sporting events, but the one day it seems nearly itself, nearly as you remember it, is when the Montreal Alouettes make their annual return for a playoff game.
In theory, even that is no sure thing, but in practice, it pretty much is, because the franchise has enjoyed an unbroken string of success since football returned to Montreal in 1996 in the form of the former Baltimore Stallions.
Jim Popp, the Als' general manager then and now, the last direct link to those days, is asked what it was like, asked what it feels like to come back to play in this building once again for the East Division final, in which Montreal takes on the Toronto Argonauts Sunday afternoon.
"It's a very different place," he says, "when it is full."
It is indeed.
By the time the previous Montreal football franchise - in its final phase, known as the Concordes - closed up shop just before the opening game of the 1987 CFL season, the Big O had long since lost its sex appeal, and the local audience for the three-down game had all but melted away. This, it seemed, especially for the francophone majority, had become an NFL town (a dreary NFL exhibition game drew well, and even the Montreal Machine in their single season playing in the World League of American Football did all right), and that didn't seem to have changed nine years later when the ex-Stallions, with nowhere else to go, arrived fresh off a Grey Cup victory.
There is a case to be made that the 1995 champions, who weren't required to maintain a Canadian-content ratio, were the greatest CFL team in history. Montreal was initially oblivious, though, and owners Jim Speros and Dr. Michael Gelfand - whose dreams of making it big in Baltimore were dashed when Art Modell moved the Cleveland Browns to town and rechristened them the Ravens - had pretty much surrendered, at least in terms of throwing good money after bad.
"For most of that season," Popp remembers, "myself and the head coach Bob Price were pulling money out our own pockets to pay for supplies. We wouldn't have enough money to pay our players for two or three weeks at a time."
Staring up at minuscule crowds (the season's ticket base was only 1,700) representing a fan base immune to the allure of "guaranteed win night," and "loonie night" - when you could get a ticket for a buck - Popp somehow maintained his optimism. He was unmoved even by calls from Don Matthews, who after leading Baltimore to glory had declined to follow the franchise to Montreal, and was enjoying success in Toronto.
"You're crazy," Matthews told Popp, offering him the chance to escape to a job with the Argos. "It will never work in Montreal. I'm not going there. I will never go there."
But Popp hung in and opened up his wallet to pay for a few more rolls of tape. "I think I was young, and naïve," he says, "and I just thought that way."
The series of miracles that ensued have been well documented: the sale of the team to Robert Wettenhall, who hired former commissioner Larry Smith as team president; the U2 concert that forced the team out of the Olympic Stadium for a 1997 playoff game and left them with only two alternatives - play on the road in Vancouver or play at decrepit Percival Molson Stadium on the McGill University campus, where a tree grew through the rotting stands; the crazy party that erupted, a reflection of a larger francophone football renaissance, which continued unabated after the team moved permanently to those cozy downtown digs; an uninterrupted run of on-field success, so predictable that it has become kind of boring.
Matthews, despite his protestations, eventually came back to town.
And the Als came back to the Big O as a once or twice-a-year novelty act, allowing the franchise to fully exploit what is top to bottom the most vigorous football culture in the country.
Friday, at practice, some of the cobwebs were kicked loose around the Stade Olympique as the Als pumped in recorded crowd noise - it sounded more like jet engines - to simulate the conditions that their players will face Sunday, when more than 50,000 fans will rock a joint that once upon a time rocked regularly for football (and yes, sigh, for baseball as well). "It can be a great place," Popp says.
It can, and Sunday, it will.