Aztecs won their first — and only — NCAA title 50 years ago. This weekend,

The line for tickets to get a seat in Peterson Gym for the first day of the 1973 NCAA Men’s Volleyball Final Four ran down 55^th Street and turned down Montezuma Road — a good 400 yards.

Official capacity of San Diego State’s Peterson Gym is 3,668. More than 6,600 tickets were sold to see Army, Ball State, Long Beach State and the Aztecs.

Fans took up every seat, jammed the aisles, hung from the rafters and ringed the court, standing 10 deep at some points to see their beloved Aztecs.

“People were in line for two, three hours,” said Craig Beery, a valuable back-row player on the ’73 team. “They had coolers, sat in beach chairs, shook our hands and wished us luck as we arrived.

“When we came out of our locker room, it was the loudest roar I’d ever heard. We couldn’t hear. We had to use hand signals to communicate on the floor.

“And it was stiflingly hot. Honestly, you could see the heat waves rising.”

Duncan McFarland, the MVP of the Final Four, remembered a match with USC where Trojans star player Steve Obradovich flipped off the Aztecs crowd.

“That got ‘em pretty fired up,” McFarland said.

Obradovich also played football at USC, winning a Rose Bowl, and later pairing with Aztecs All-American Chris Marlowe to win The Manhattan Beach Open, the premier beach volleyball event.

In a round-robin format in the Final Four, San Diego State nearly blanked Army (15-1, 15-6), beat Ball State (17-19, 15-12, 15-5), and survived a loss to Long Beach State (15-10, 13-15, 7-15) to earn a spot in Saturday’s knockout round.

The Aztecs breezed by Ball State (15-5, 15-7, 15-10) in the morning semifinal, earning the right to play Long Beach State and All-Americans Dodge Parker and Miles Pabst in the championship match.

Nearly 10,000 fans — at the time the largest crowd to watch a volleyball match in the United States — packed the San Diego Sports Arena.

Those fans saw the Aztecs rally from a 15-11 Game 1 loss to beat the 49ers 15-13, 15-8, 15-6 to claim San Diego State’s first NCAA Division I Championship. The Aztecs will go for No. 2 on Saturday, when San Diego State’s men’s basketball team takes on Florida Atlantic in the Final Four, held in Houston. The winner will play Monday for a national title.

Then, like now, San Diego State was squarely in the spotlight.

The championship match was televised on ABC’s Wide World of Sports with legendary broadcaster Keith Jackson and UCLA coach Al Scates calling the action.

The match was also featured in Sports Illustrated. The first sentence of Curry Kirkpatrick’s article was “Among quivering navels and puka shell necklaces, an NCAA championship was decided.”

The players wore puka shells. The women in the crowd wore the cutoff tops.

It wasn’t all sunshine, shells and smiles, however.

“San Diego State’s administration wasn’t on our side,” said McFarland, who along with Marlowe and Randy Stevenson were the All-American stars of the ’73 Aztecs.

“Peterson Gym was used…