July 16, 1978, is a day my brothers and I will always (try to) remember. And one my parents long tried to forget.

It was the Rolling Stones at Folsom Field. The “Some Girls” tour. A ticket ran $12. Kansas and Eddie Money opened. The Stones began with “Let It Rock,” a Chuck Berry cover. “All Down the Line.” “Honky Tonk Women.”

After that? Well, the details become a little sketchy. Let’s just say my brother was found … eventually.

If you had told me then that the Rolling Stones would still be playing stadium shows 45 years later, I would have suggested that was just your imagination — running away with you.

But, here we are. The baddest boys of British rock are back, preparing to return to Mile High Stadium on Thursday. They are calling this the “Hackney Diamonds” tour, but let’s call it what it is: The “Now or Never” tour. This is surely your last chance to ever see the Stones play live in Colorado. There seems to be some pervading denial about that reality, but Jagger is 80, for crying out loud. He is a rock star, not a presidential candidate.

The Stones’ colorful concert history in Colorado goes back 59 years to Nov. 29, 1965, when the surging band played before 12,000 at the Denver Coliseum, home to the National Western Stock Show. According to a Denver Public Library account, the six opening acts spanned the University of Denver’s own The Fogcutters to the Rocking Ramrods to Patti La Belle and the Blue Belles — described at the time by the Rocky Mountain News as “a quartet of pretty, teenaged ladies from Philadelphia.”

Many in the local theater community know John Ashton as an actor and director. But he’s also a journalist, and probably the only one who has worked full-time for The Denver Post, the Rocky Mountain News and Westword. Covering the band’s 1972 return to the Denver Coliseum for The Post, Ashton coined a phrase for the ages:

“Before the concert began, the bittersweet smell of felonious weed drifted around on all sides, and Frisbees sailed like seagulls,” Ashton wrote. One DPL reader observed: “’Felonious Weed’ would make for a great band name!” (And who could argue that point?) News reports later chronicled 40 arrests for drunk and disorderly conduct, 29 for possession of narcotics and six for concealed weapons.

At the 1975 show attended by 40,000 at Hughes Stadium in Fort Collins, Elton John joined the Stones on stage, to disastrous results. John reportedly tried to play along for two songs on piano, but he didn’t know the parts. The crowd began booing and band members asked John to leave.

The Stones have played twice in Boulder. The 1978 show was supposed to have happened over two reserved days in Denver at Mile High, but it was reported that promoter Barry Fey pulled out and moved to Boulder in protest of Denver’s 10% seat tax.

Thursday will be the Stones’ 14th Colorado concert. The band itself is now 62 years old, and it’s impossible to overstate the impact it has had on several generations of impressionable youth.

“My first concert was the Stones at Folsom Field in 1978,” said Arvada’s Ranger Miller. “It was so powerful an experience, it became like a religion to me.”

He was just 16 at the time.

Miller, now a United Airlines pilot living in Guam, has fronted his own garage band for more than 40 years called The Duke Street Kings. He founded the Blues & BBQ for Better Housing (recently renamed the Edgewater Music Festival), which returns for a 27th year on Saturday (June 22) to add to the $530,000 it already has raised over the years for Habitat for Humanity of Metro Denver.

I was an acolyte, too. I wiled away the hours of my high-school theology class creating a crude pen-and-ink mosaic of Rolling Stones song titles. Later, as a student at CU Boulder, we named our intramural basketball team the Tumblin’ Dice. One of my best friends hung tumblin’ dice from his car’s rear-view mirror.

That was around the time my youth theater director, a mysterious but legendary figure who goes only by the name K.Q., told me he was creating an original musical called “A Question of Balance,” based on the Moody Blues song title. It would cover the history of the world from the Big Bang through the Civil Rights movement, all set to contemporary songs like Bette Midler’s “The Rose.” K.Q. asked me to read the script and comment.

My only beef? He had a metaphorical Christ-like figure at the center of things, but no antagonist in the story. No acknowledgement of the existence of evil. He agreed and told me to write the part — and play it. Thus, the (semi) fictional character of “Evil, The World Hater” was born. I wore appropriately devil-red MC Hammer parachute pants. I was assigned four minions called The Garbagemen who did my evil bidding while wearing black leather and spikes.

And while I did successfully lobby for us baddies to get to perform a suicide montage set to the tune of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” K.Q. drew the line at my grandest idea: I wanted to walk on stage singing the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black,” carrying an open gallon of paint that I would use every night to drench the set in, yes, black. (Apparently that messy artistic inspiration posed several logistical challenges for the crew.)

Alas, I did not get to show my moves like Jagger.

But I remained loyal to the Stones. To this day, I will argue that the single greatest Stones song is not a Stones song at all — it’s “Wandering Spirit,” off a 1993 Jagger solo album.

And I am not the only one who remembers the Stones concerts of our youth somewhat hazily. Nicole Harrison, an award-winning Denver costume designer for many local theater companies, saw what turned out to be a historic (bleep) show on Oct. 18, 1989, at the L.A. Coliseum — but not because of the Stones. Because of the opener — Guns & Roses. The bill featured what, at the time, was surely the biggest band on Earth opening for what, at the time, was surely the greatest band in rock history.

Harrison naturally remembers Jagger’s outfits and the set design more than the music. She recalls giant, stage-sized blow-up dolls gyrating to the music — and Jagger somehow managing to kiss them.

Problem was, Axl Rose, frontman for Guns & Roses, was a no-show. Frantic management reportedly called in a favor with the L.A. Police Department, who sent two uniforms to Rose’s house with orders to drag him out by any means necessary. With sirens wailing and lights ablaze, the cops delivered Rose to the Coliseum, where, after one song, he fell off the stage and down 15 feet. Rose quit the band. But then again, he did that a lot.

“It’s kind of a blur, but one of my all-time favorite concerts,” Harrison said.

Everyone who has seen the Stones, it seems, has a story of something magical happening. Take for example, Denver’s Carol Timblin, who saw one of the shows at CU’s Folsom Field. “We were sitting on the grass when a baggie of weed came flying out of nowhere and landed in my friend’s lap,” Timblin said. Magic.

Thursday’s concert will bring out plenty of old-school fans like Denver’s Lisa Baxter, who says, “There’s nothing like the Stones in all of music history for me — and who knows if this is my last chance to see them?”

(I really think I know that this is her last chance to see them, at least in Denver.)

I actually heard from quite a few lifelong fans who will be seeing the band live for the first time on Thursday. One is Philip Sneed, CEO of the Arvada Center. He’s hoping to hear “Paint it Black.” Alison Palmer is jonesing for “Moonlight Mile.” Baxter wants to hear “Wild Horses.”

Miller, the pilot-slash-garage rocker, is holding out for “Sweet Sounds of Heaven” and “Before They Make Me Run.” That and one other thing.

“I hope I’m having that much fun at 80,” he said.