By asking taxpayers to kick in nearly $400 million for a football stadium, the Minnesota Vikings took possession of the ball on their own 10-yard line.

Here’s a way they could advance beyond the midfield line on a single play:

Revisit the idea of sharing a stadium with the University of Minnesota.

The stadium math in the Twin Cities area is getting absurd, and Minnesotans from the metro as well as outstate areas seem very unlikely to accept it. If you add up the baseball Twins proposal, the university’s own football stadium plan and the new Vikings idea, you hit $1.5 billion in proposed stadium construction.

In a year in which the state government shut down because Republicans and Democrats quarreled over $800 million in funding, getting Minnesotans to pay the lion’s share of the costs of

those facilities seems a near impossibility.

Unless …

Unless planners pick up an idea that never should have been dropped: the idea of the Vikings and the university’s Golden Gophers sharing a stadium.

In January 2004, the Minneapolis Star Tribune polled Minnesotans about their stadium views. Twenty-nine percent of the respondents said the Vikings and the Twins each should get a new stadium; 16 percent wanted the Gophers to get their own stadium.

But here’s the clincher:

More than half of the respondents said the Vikings and the Gophers should continue to share a stadium.

In a time of tight budgets, the idea simply makes sense. Neither football team plays enough games to justify a stadium all its own. The teams do, however, play on different days of the week, which means the teams’ schedules would not conflict in a shared stadium.

Add the fact that the teams are sure to get a better deal from the state if they’d agree to share, and you’ve got …

Well, you’ve got the situation in Pittsburgh, where the 65,000-seat Heinz Field was built in 2001 for the Pittsburgh Steelers and University of Pittsburgh Panthers.

Heinz Field cost $230 million. Of that amount, the Steelers paid $76.5 million, the H.J. Heinz Co. paid $57 million over 20 years for the naming rights and taxpayers picked up the rest.

The horsehoe-shaped stadium features 120 luxury suites and a view of Pittsburgh’s three rivers and downtown skyline. Its design won a Grand Award in the 2002 National Engineering Excellence Award competition and is a showpiece for the region.

Clearly, it can be done. It should be done in Minnesota, a thrifty state whose residents are sure to balk at the pricey cloud-castles being dreamt up by visionaries in St. Paul.

&045; Grand Forks Herald