‘College GameDay’ at Indiana was years in the making. Now it’s real.

College GameDay has been to Bloomington, Ind., before. Just not for football.

ESPN’s beloved college football show has been operational since the mid-1990s, but Indiana hasn’t been good enough to get a taste. Despite playing in the Big Ten all that time, not a single IU game — home or away — has hosted the GameDay crew. The Hoosier basketball team has gotten GameDay twice since that version debuted in 2005.

Football joins the party on Thursday. Ahead of the Hoosiers’ 8 p.m. ET, ESPN kickoff against Ohio State, GameDay will broadcast from Bloomington. It’s usually a once-a-week show, and the main event this week is Alabama-Florida State on Saturday (8 p.m. ET, ABC).

But because it’s Week 1, we’re getting two GameDays. ESPN’s also giving OSU-IU the MEGACAST treatment, with alternate coverage options available on its other platforms. It’s the beginning of a big year for the Hoosiers, who finally have a spotlight.

SB Nation’s Hoosiers blog, The Crimson Quarry, in 2015 began a movement called #iufb4gameday.

Indiana started that season 4-0, which was a huge deal for a program that hadn’t reached a bowl since 2007 and hadn’t been good in a lot longer than that. (Or really ever, if we’re being totally candid.) The unbeaten Hoosiers were hosting defending national champion and No. 1 Ohio State.

Indiana became the internet’s team for about a week, as we all pushed hard to convince ESPN to send GameDay to its campus. The network heard the uproar.

ESPN settled on a Notre Dame-Clemson game in Death Valley. It’s hard to knock that choice. Irish-Tigers was a classic, with Clemson winning by snuffing out a two-point conversion attempt right before the final whistle.

Still, IU got points for trying, and the Hoosiers gave the Buckeyes a good run before falling, 34-27. Two years later, IU fans are getting what they wanted.

The set will be inside Memorial Stadium, not on some lawn outside of it. And it’ll be a Thursday night, which is different than the usual Saturday morning deal. But for the GameDay team, it’s a chance to do a show from a new place, and that’s fun for them.

“We always kind of hear that groundswell of support locally for a certain school,” analyst Kirk Herbstreit says. “Ultimately, we don’t really make a decision. Obviously, our bosses do. No matter what I say, it doesn’t really necessarily impact where we go. But we hear it.”

“This is a beautiful campus, by the way,” he adds. “I love Bloomington.”

As the Hoosiers’ head coach, Kevin Wilson brought Indiana to back-to-back bowl bids the last two seasons. Before last year’s bowl, the school suddenly cut ties with Wilson, citing concerns about the way he treated his players. Technically, he resigned.

Wilson is now Ohio State’s offensive coordinator, here to make the Buckeyes more balanced and faster. His first game is against his old team, on his old campus.

It’s business as usual for college coaches to face their old employers, but this one’s a little extra interesting. Nearly IU’s entire roster is made up of Wilson’s recruits. The program’s current status as a not-terrible, generally adequate team is owed to him.

Ohio State should win. But if the Hoosiers can swing a massive upset, it’ll be because of the foundation Wilson built — and it’ll happen on a stage he helped set.