Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to step to the table and sign a declaration, so to speak. The Great Transition War is over.

The first shot was fired on Aug. 30, 2002, when North Dakota State stated its intention to move to Division I athletics. The University of North Dakota retaliated, saying it wanted no part of D-I at that time. There's no need to go back through history again because it is no longer relevant to today's athletic environment.

The whizzing match is over.

The generals who were in charge at the time have moved on. The former presidents of NDSU and UND have retired. The athletic directors have moved on. The principal coaching figures are doing other things.

This week, we learned UND is expected to leave the Big Sky Conference and join the Summit League and Missouri Valley Football Conference. When that becomes official, the Fighting Hawks and Bison will be reunited in the same league for the first time since 2003-04 when both were in the Division II North Central Conference.

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That was 13 years ago. The freshmen at UND and NDSU this year were around kindergarten age when that was going down, so they really have no concept of the old turf battles. You have to wonder if they even care about it.

Remember the Battle of Alexandria? That was a classic when former UND president Charles Kupchella and former NDSU president Joe Chapman took opposite stances on Division I athletics at the 2002 annual NCC meeting at Arrowwood Resort hotel in Alexandria, Minn.

There should be some sort of historical monument in the hotel lobby to mark that showdown.

Certainly, there will be hangers-on to the Great Transition War. Those folks will probably remind me of that Gilligan's Island episode where the castaways stumbled upon a former Japanese sailor, who didn't know World War II had ended.

I'm not going to pretend to be Gilligan and rescue everybody but when enough school presidents of the Summit and Missouri Valley Football Conference give approval for UND in two separate expansion votes, then that will be like the Berlin Wall between Fargo and Grand Forks being torn down.

And let the intensity between the lines once again do the talking. Let the players decide who is the better team every year, not the fans on social media.

In football, there was a time when Iowa and Iowa State went 43 years without playing each other, resuming the rivalry in 1977. NDSU and UND did more of a toe-in-the-water resurrection scheduling each other in 2015 and 2019.

It may be awhile before we know the Missouri Valley scheduling model of eight league games with 11 teams, but you would think UND and NDSU will play each other every year. And that means the schools have three years to figure out a traveling trophy. Rivalry games need trophies: They just do.

With an American Indian head on one side and a buffalo on the other, the Nickel is out, of course. UND was the last team to win the Nickel in 2003 and, by the way, will somebody at UND please donate that historical artifact to the North Dakota Heritage Center in Bismarck? It needs to be put away permanently in a museum and doesn't need to be dangling out there for somebody to make a mockery of it.

On a larger scale, so much is different for all four of the Dakota schools since 2003-04. A nickname has changed. Facilities have been vastly upgraded at NDSU, UND, South Dakota and South Dakota State.

For about a decade they were four schools looking to someday be considered legitimate Division I institutions in all areas. That day has arrived.

The end of the Great Transition War is another sign of that.