Marshall lives on after 50 years, thankfully.

The 50th anniversary of the tragic plane crash that killed 75 Marshall football players, coaches and staff is Saturday when the undefeated and No. 16 Thundering Herd plays Middle Tennessee.

It continues a tradition at the school where, every year, on the Saturday closest to the November 14 date of the catastrophe a home game is played and those who perished are honored.

The 2006 movie “We Are Marshall,” with Matthew McConaughey and Kate Mara, popularized the tragedy and showed the Spring Hill Cemetery in Huntington, West Virginia, where those who died are all buried. Frank Beamer is among the coaches who brought his team to Spring Hill the day before Virginia Tech played at Marshall.

The film begins with the plane crash but goes on to tell the story of how the school and decimated football program recovered.  McConaughey plays Jack Lengyel, an unknown coach from the College of Wooster in Ohio who took on the impossible job, which was helped by the NCAA allowing new recruits to play immediately on the varsity in the era of freshman ineligibility.

Lengyel hired Red Dawson, the Marshall assistant coach who did not fly back with the team from East Carolina after the game. Dawson, now 78, reportedly still struggles with survivor’s guilt, a form of Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder, because he was spared.

“It’s a movie about core values,” Lengyel said, in 2006. “Hope and faith and perseverance and love. Love.”

At Marshall University, watching the movie is part of orientation for every new athlete who arrives on campus, all born decades after the accident. Even though the chant “We Are Marshall” did not begin until years later, it is depicted as a rallying cry by students right after.

“The chant was never a part of our game,” Lengyel said. “It came later, but it’s very appropriate for the movie … It’s a statement that ties ‘we’ and everybody in the town, the community and the football team together.”

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