The Portland Fire returned to the WNBA on Saturday night after 24 years away, opening their first season back at the Moda Center against the Chicago Sky before thousands of fans. Lines to get inside were still wrapping around the plaza even after tip off.
The crowd was big enough to make the comeback feel bigger than a single game. Sen. Ron Wyden was there, and fans around him said the Fire’s return was a milestone for Portland and for women’s sports more broadly.
Grace Pytynia-Hillier said the night showed the league is still expanding, pointing to the three more teams already set to join the WNBA. She said it also underscored how much women’s sports matter through their strength and community. Robin Wisner, who said he is new to the WNBA, said the return gave him hope. He said it also sent a message about the Northwest of Portland and what it offers families who want to be engaged.
That sense of significance had been building for months in a city that once had a WNBA team and then watched it disappear. On Saturday, the Fire’s name was back in front of a full arena, with the night serving as both a basketball return and a public test of whether the market still had the appetite to support it.
Wyden cast the game as a breakthrough for Oregon, calling it a “huge, huge day for women’s sports in Oregon” and saying, “Nobody thought we could do it.” He said the team could become “a huge bonanza for the state” and “a big economic multiplier,” adding that after the WNBA commissioner visited the Sports Bra, “we knew we were going to beat out the teams back East.”
The tension in the return is hard to miss: the Fire are back, the building was full, and the enthusiasm was real, but the team now has to turn a celebratory debut into something lasting. For fans like Wisner, the payoff would be more than wins and losses. He said his granddaughters are interested in learning a sport competitively and in the camaraderie of being proud of who they are in the games they play.
If Saturday was any guide, Portland is ready to watch that experiment unfold in public.
