Seventy-five years young is next week’s Kansas Relays, the track and field meet that would not die. They couldn’t fold it, they couldn’t spindle it and they couldn’t mutilate it.

The Kansas Relays is like a cat with nine lives. They dumped the Relays for three years during World War II. They sent it to Oklahoma during a Memorial Stadium renovation in 1978. And they flat canceled the spring track carnival in 1998 and 1999 while they refurbished the stadium.

Few, to tell the truth, expected the Kansas Relays to see the 21st Century after the latest absence. The KU athletic department wasn’t flush enough to fund it and corporate sponsors had come and gone.

“Things didn’t look good for a couple of years,” said meet director Tim Weaver, a glib, enthusiastic guy who sounds like he would raise catfish in the steeplechase pit if he thought it would save the Relays.

KU officials dropped men’s tennis and axed men’s swimming, but the Kansas Relays lives on, thanks to alumni support, concessions and, most important, university funding.

All in all, the Kansas Relays is a track and field cattle call, yet it is also one of the school’s best recruiting tools. The Relays brings hundreds of high school students who would otherwise never see the campus. How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?

“There’s no better setting for a track meet than at the foot of Campanile Hill,” Weaver gushed. “It’s a fantastic setting.”

Fantastic, yes. But it’s a setting that will not last forever because the view is from the post-World War I era when tracks inside football stadiums were like one-lane bridges functional then, outdated now.

In the Big 12 Conference today, Kansas is the lone school with a track inside its football stadium. Contemporary collegiate minds have bowed one by one to football’s ongoing ability to generate revenue and have deemed stadiums to be football-only facilities.

Kansas can’t hold out forever. Plans already exist to erect a free-standing track and field layout probably south of Anschutz Pavilion but available land is scarce and the money to build is even scarcer. Still, it will happen someday. It’s inevitable.

When the track is removed from the stadium, the football field will be lowered and seats will be added to put fans right on top of the action like they are in Allen Fieldhouse, KU’s other aging but ageless sports venue.

Memorial Stadium and Allen Fieldhouse may be long in the tooth, but the two facilities are antique-unique. To replace them would be unthinkable. Memorial Stadium is the seventh-oldest football stadium in the country, but renovation has enhanced its charm and the setting is, of course, unsurpassed.

Meanwhile, Allen Fieldhouse, while basically nondescript and sitting in a mundane spot on the other side of Mount Oread, oozes so much basketball tradition you’d expect a sledge hammer to bounce off if some misguided soul ordered the building razed.

Then again, Allen Fieldhouse might reject the sledge simply because it was built like the Maginot Line with enough concrete to make it the Rock of Gibraltar of the Wakarusa and enough steel to span the Kaw.

Allen Fieldhouse it’s no longer a fieldhouse, really, but who would dare change the name to Allen Arena? and Memorial Stadium are like the Kansas Relays. They may not always exist in their original form, but they refuse to die.

If you haven’t considered attending the Kansas Relays and, face it, you haven’t look at it from the perspective that if you take your children or grandchildren they will be doing something their children and grandchildren will never be able to do.

What was it like to watch a track meet in Memorial Stadium? Glad you asked.

Sometimes it rained and spoiled everything, but other times the days of the Kansas Relays were so beautiful you wanted to paint the greening grass, the blossoming redbuds and the warming sun on a canvas you could frame and file away in the part of your brain that enables you to understand a thing of beauty is a joy forever.

Not only that. Lots of the races are exciting, too.