HARRISONBURG — Mickey Matthews’ initial memory about that night wasn’t Clint Kent’s title-clinching interception or Maurice Fenner’s 164 rushing yards.

It wasn’t celebrating with his James Madison players or holding the trophy either.

“The conditions of the field were absolutely deplorable,” Matthews said with a chuckle. “They had sodded it like three or four days before the game, and I’m sure they lost their jobs over it, but someone convinced them if they laid the sod down in December that the Bermuda sod would take. And I don’t know how long it’d been, maybe a week or two and I can’t answer that, but we walked over there the morning of the game and when we walked over on the field, they were picking up the sod. There was no field. … So I hope the field is in better shape.”

This Saturday, for the first time since Matthews, the former Dukes coach, led Madison to its first national championship on Dec. 17, 2004 with a 31-21 win over Montana, JMU will play at Finley Stadium in Chattanooga, Tenn., when it meets Chattanooga for a 4 p.m. non-conference kickoff.

“I guess it’s been 15 years,” Matthews said. “Time flies, but it feels like it was yesterday.”

The coach with the most wins in school history, Matthews, along with Kent and others involved, had no problem recalling the details of that night in the city on the southern Tennessee border and all that it took to get there.

***

The season before the historic one wasn’t anything thrilling as the Dukes finished 6-6 in 2003, but it did mark a one-win improvement from 2002 and a four-win improvement from 2001.

There was a positive trend and players, who thought they were capable of more, wanted it to continue.

“That summer leading up to the ’04 season, we got [quarterback] Justin Rascati in from Louisville but the whole team stayed,” Kent, a junior cornerback that year, said. “We just gained that chemistry, man. Basically, the great feeling was it felt like family. We all hung out with each other — white, black, Hispanic, whatever. We always did things together to develop that bond. And I think that’s what made us very successful.”

Summer strength and conditioning wasn’t an expectation in college football then like it is now, but the veteran JMU players prioritized it and took advantage of being around each other.

“My senior class, we had a ton of adversity and a roller coaster of emotions the seasons before,” said Matt LeZotte, a senior in 2004 and a three-time JMU team captain. “We had losing seasons, but had won some games and I think when it came down to it and we got together as a unit, we said, ‘This is on us whether we do it or not,’ and that’s when you started to really see a change.”

Rascati said different teammates took turns hosting cookouts and that the whole squad would show up at the campus rec center to play pickup basketball.

“I came from Louisville where we didn’t do that. It was very different,” Rascati said.

June and July became the foundation for a season that didn’t end until a week before Christmas.

“When I got there that summer with all the 7-on-7s and extra workouts we were doing and the participation we had,” Rascati said, “all the guys said we never had this participation and this amount of guys that stayed the entirety of summer. We put that extra work in and so we went into that season very confident because of our preparation.”

***

Depending on who’s telling their version of the 2004 season, the moment JMU elevated its hopes of having a winning campaign or reaching the postseason to actually capturing the I-AA crown differs.

There were plays of significance and instances of consequence that defined the path of the would-be champions.

“When I thought we could win it was at West Virginia,” Matthews said of the game the I-A No. 6 Mountaineers won 45-10.

JMU held West Virginia scoreless in the first quarter and kept it close until WVU got two touchdowns within a 14-second span late in the first half to go up 21-0.

“And West Virginia had a heck of a team that year,” Matthews said. “I walked in the locker room after the game because our kids had fought real hard and I was going to tell ‘em how proud I was because no one gave up and that everyone should hold their heads high. But when I went in the locker room, all the kids were pissed off. I looked around the locker room and they were fixing to whip me. They didn’t want anyone to tell them how hard they played.”

Most of Matthews’ players weren’t as optimistic as he was after that. They needed to see positive results that ended with them on the winning side of the scoreboard.

Freshman safety Tony LeZotte, who led JMU with 144 tackles and was an Associated Press All-American in his first year as a starter that fall, said he was convinced on the heels of Madison’s win over Hofstra the next week as the team showed resiliency behind Fenner’s 148 rushing yards and three touchdowns.

“I knew we had something good going,” the younger LeZotte brother said.

Curt Dudley, the current director of broadcast services for the school and television voice of JMU football, was part of the 2004 radio crew.

“It kind of slowly developed,” Dudley said. “It was kind of a week-in, week-out situation. I don’t think there was one defining moment at the time.”

By that point, Rascati was gaining confidence in his full-time starting quarterback role, replacing Matt LeZotte, who was the team’s starter the three previous seasons. But Rascati still hadn’t been forced to win a game for his new teammates.

He had played a role in wins and scored touchdowns, but at Alfond Stadium in mid-October, the Dukes needed more from their signal-caller.

“We found a way to win versus Maine,” said Rascati, whose 7-yard touchdown run to open the fourth quarter and 23-yard touchdown pass to wide receiver D.D. Boxley with 48 seconds left led Madison to a 24-20 come-from-behind victory.

“The team just stuck together and played four quarters and competed well offensively, defensively and on special teams,” Rascati said. “That was the game that really showed how tight-knit we were and how good of a football team we were to get the big win on the road.”

Momentum carried into November by the time defending I-AA champion Delaware visited Bridgeforth Stadium. The Dukes were winners of five straight and looking to make it six in a row.

“That punt return by Cortez [Thompson], oh my,” Boxley said. “That was amazing. Everybody became believers.”

Boxley, Matthews, Kent and Tony LeZotte all said Thompson’s 87-yard punt return for a touchdown with three minutes to play to beat the Blue Hens was a seminal moment is an unforgettable season. Delaware outgained JMU 466 yards to 166 that day, but the Dukes picked off three passes, Akeem Jordan blocked a punt, Rodney McCarter blocked a field goal and Thompson won the game with his punt return.

“That was the pivotal individual play,” Dudley said.

JMU needed to stop Delaware at the 3-yard line to secure the victory, but Matthews said if it wasn’t clear earlier in the season that the Dukes were title contenders, it was obvious after the gut-check victory.

“The crowd was off-the-scale loud and as loud as it gets in the SEC,” Matthews, a former assistant at Georgia before taking the JMU job, said. “And it was really loud, but we beat Delaware and we won the championship. That was late in the season, but that was as an exciting football game as you could ever play in. And then we won games with that group of kids that would fight you over a dime.”

***

They’d have to fight, too.

JMU lost its last home game to William & Mary before salvaging the regular-season finale at Towson to get into the playoffs as one of four Atlantic-10 teams to reach the postseason, but the NCAA committee didn’t do the Dukes any favors.

“You know the toughest thing about it was what everyone on the outside was saying,” then-running backs coach Ulrick Edmonds said.

Madison’s road to Chattanooga was exactly that — all on the road.

JMU is still the only program FCS history to win the championship after playing only games away from home to get there.

“The easiest thing was that nobody expected that group of kids to be where they were anyway,” Edmonds said. “So those kids, and it’d probably be so different now because of social media, but those kids didn’t even care. They just knew, ‘We’ve got to go play a game at Lehigh.’”

The first- and second-round contests were similar. JMU beat Lehigh 14-13 and Furman 14-13 while leaning on its defense to advance. Tony LeZotte called those games “15-round fights” and said it took a special effort to slow Furman quarterback Ingle Martin, a Florida transfer who’d go onto play in the NFL.

Dukes linebacker Trey Townsend had three pass breakups against the Mountain Hawks and then 10 tackles and a sack against the Paladins.

“Trey played great for us, but for whatever the reason he didn’t make the first-team all-conference defense,” Matthews said. “Well, when that comes out at the end of the regular season, Trey was so mad that nobody voted for him that he decided he’d be Dick Butkus in the last four games of the season. He played terrific and was our best defensive player the last four games, and we laughed every Sunday watching the tape. We said, ‘Shoot, we should’ve told him he wasn’t going to be all-conference in the middle of the season.’”

Matthews said he thought if JMU got by Furman, which earned the No. 2 seed in the postseason, that his team wouldn’t have a problem winning the championship especially considering Delaware got beat by William & Mary.

Everyone in the program felt they’d get their revenge on the Tribe.

“The game that sticks out to me is the [regular season] William & Mary game that we lost,” Edmonds said. “The guys were hurt, but they were like, ‘We’ll get them back.’ And I never like the analogy of, ‘When you lose, you win,’ because it’s not true in college sports, but the guys understood, they gave it all they had.

“William & Mary had an excellent team and the field goal kicker kicked a field goal that was just drilled, so we lost the game, but the kids had a look in their eyes like, ‘This is what it feels like to lose and we don’t want to feel this again.’”

And they wouldn’t thanks to ground effort from Edmonds’ backs and the Dukes’ offensive line.

Through the stretch run and into the tournament, junior running back Raymond Hines was taking the majority of carries with Fenner and Alvin Banks slowly returning from injuries suffered earlier in the season. Hines, who was the third-string back to begin the year, had five 100-yard performances to his name leading into the semifinals.

“Raymond Hines was about 150 pounds soaking wet,” Matthews said. “He looked like one of the student managers, but you talk about a kid answering the call for the next man up, he did it, because we didn’t know what he could do.

“But Raymond played terrifically for about eight games. But against William & Mary during the second half, he just ran out of gas. He was beat to death.”

Edmonds said JMU had no choice but to turn to Fenner and Banks after halftime in order to make the trip to The Volunteer State happen.

“Let’s just say it was an extremely one-sided conversation,” Matthews said. “That football team there in that locker room needed those two guys to grow up and play, and I said, ‘You’re both going to play this second half, and if we don’t win this game, it’ll be your fault.’ I said, ‘We do not have another tailback on the team.’ And they both answered the call.”

Fenner finished with 117 rushing yards and Banks scored a rushing touchdown, which was enough to aid a defense that slowed William & Mary quarterback Lang Campbell, the 2004 Walter Payton Award winner, just enough. Kent had a 69-yard interception return for a touchdown to give JMU a three-score lead in the opening quarter.

“The main thing was that we didn’t want to give up the deep ball,” Kent said. “We wanted to make him earn it and throw check downs, because once you give up the big one, it can cost you.”

***

In Chattanooga, nothing didn’t go as planned.

“When I would meet with Mickey, we’d do the pregame interview for the radio network on Thursdays,” Dudley said. “And I’d get a really good perspective for the interview, but more so after the interview. Mickey and I’d talk 20 to 25 minutes or to an hour sometimes after the interview was done, but the one thing that stands out about that year is how Coach Matthews could be so accurate with the outcome of upcoming games.

“It was an exception year of scouting, knowing the opposition and knowing what it would take to win certain ball games and that happened all the way through the national championship.”

Montana, coached by Bobby Hauck, had shared the Big Sky title with Eastern Washington and then beat Northwestern State, New Hampshire and Sam Houston State to reach the title game.

“We thought up front we could dominate them,” Matthews said. “Our offensive line was much better than them. We didn’t think they were very good. They had a skill kid or two that we were concerned with and it probably hurt Montana that the field was so bad, but we had good corners.”

Matt LeZotte remembered JMU’s confidence from the start.

“I’ll never forget walking out with the captains and we started to walk out and I stopped,” LeZotte said. “I turned around and looked each one of them in the eyes — Trey, Rodney and Leon [Mizelle] — and I said ‘Go win this game for me’ and there was no doubt in their eyes.”

The Grizzlies scored first, but it didn’t alter Madison’s belief.

“I’ll be honest with you, they went down and scored on us the first drive and I was thinking ‘OK, this isn’t good,’” Tony LeZotte said. “But we ended up holding them 14 points the rest of the way and did a really good job on defense.”

Meanwhile, the rushing combination of Rascati, Fenner and Banks was, as Matthew’s predicted, too much for Montana. The Dukes ran for 314 yards as Rascati and Fenner each scored two rushing touchdowns.

Rascati’s 6-yard scoring sprint gave JMU the 31-21 score it would win by. Kent’s interception came on the last play Montana ran.

“To be honest and I played professionally for six years, but that’s probably my most memorable moment in my entire football career,” Kent said. “I’ve been playing football since I was 7 years old. Just to seal that deal and to be able to bring the school their first national championship, I’m still speechless.”

Said Boxley: “It was amazing. There was so much excitement and it’s great, you know, how we came together as team. When we first got there, the team wasn’t where you want a team to be. They won two games and then when we got there we got to .500, and then just to flip it that quick. That was amazing.”

Said Matthews: “We won games anyway you could do it. We won it with the kicking game. We won it with goal-line stands. We won it on offense. That group of kids was so competitive and they just refused to lose. They just refused to lose.”