Sometime during the third quarter of the Arizona-Washington State football game last week in Pullman, I turned to my companion (who is my wife) and launched into a story. Got about halfway through it when the decibels hit.

I threw up my hands and postponed the rest.

WSU is advertising a new sound system, along with some other game-day enhancements like a new video board. And the Cougars seemed hell-bent the other day on cranking up the volume to bang-on-the-walls, call-the-cops level.

This is apparently the thing now in college sports. Among the sea of other unpleasant choices – like paying $4 million for your quarterback, who is there because he couldn’t go somewhere else – each second must be jammed with 747-level-takeoff noise, because, well, somebody must want it that way.

Who, exactly?

Over at Washington, where the Huskies were hosting Minnesota, a friend texted me, “I noticed they were playing very loud music incredibly close to the opposing snap . . . which I thought was low-class. No rules in college football anymore.”

Another friend at that game said, “I’m down on the sidelines quite a bit. I have to wear earplugs. I never (routinely) wear earplugs. It’s pretty damn loud.”

Another friend who has season tickets at Oregon portrayed it this way: “Ducks invested in scoreboard and sound system a few years ago too, and it’s pretty much nonstop sound and visual assault throughout the game now. Annoying. Guy across aisle from me wears headphones to block out noise.”

A few hours after the Arizona-WSU game ended, we found ourselves in a bar and ran into some friends. Unsolicited, one of them laid into the intrusion of the stadium boombox on the viewing experience.

I realize I’m probably behind the curve on this. I don’t get to more than one or two games a season, and I’m pretty sure college programs have been blasting music for at least a decade, likely more.

It’s just that it’s a Tourette’s festival of music blurting for maybe 10 to 15 seconds, yanking you to attention and then divebombing – ostensibly – at the snap of the ball. But I swear the Arizona center was sometimes having to make line calls after gripping the ball and pointing out alignment as the cacophony played on for a second or so.

Sometimes, immediately after a play ended, the music cranked while the WSU public-address announcer was trying to summarize the action.

Once the ears stopped ringing, I heard the echoes of something Jim Walden told me last May.

I’m pretty sure it was the last interview he gave before his death July 3. In a wide-ranging conversation, he unearthed a couple of Jim Walden’s greatest hits, criticizing the support from Spokane, and . . .

“The next thing that infuriated me was, the damn students staying a half and then leaving.”

I saw it first-hand last week. I’d heard the complaint over the years, and witnessed it. But seeing it was jarring. Indeed, to borrow from Walden, it’s the damnedest thing.

At the start of an entertaining game with Arizona, there were maybe 1,500 seats vacant in the WSU student section. At the start of the third quarter, with the Cougars leading 17-14, that bubble had probably doubled or more. And by the fourth quarter, much of which was competitive, the Cougars within a touchdown, I’d guess only 15-20 percent of the student section was occupied.

Yes, it got chllly, as a 60-ish afternoon dipped into the upper 40s. Otherwise, there seemed to be absolutely no correlation between score and students.

My assumption is that the marketing whizzes in our college athletic departments have concluded that the deafening, non-stop licks of rap and hip-hop are an effort to reach the students. So, at WSU, at least, they’re reaching out to . . . people who aren’t there?

(Wherever they went, they might have heard it, anyway.)

At any rate, the whole thing drove Walden crazy.

“What is there about an hour and a half in the second half . . . ?” he said plaintively. “That’s just one beer. That just infuriated me. You look around the United States, and you don’t see any other student body anywhere” leaving in large numbers at halftime.

“It’s such a slam to their football players.”

I’m sympathetic to the Cougars, who were already swimming upstream before they were slugged with realignment, budget slashes and court fights. And maybe the use of the new sound system is a work in progress. But their blaring pursuit of their students may be falling on deaf ears.