Dennis Ryan is exactly the kind of person the Pro Football Hall of Fame had in mind when it established an "Awards of Excellence" program in 2022 to honor significant contributors to the game in behind-the-scenes roles.

So come June 26, the former Vikings equipment manager will have his name added to the Hall's exhibit as one of the best equipment managers in league history. He'll be joined this year by fellow equipment managers Tom Gray (Bengals) and George Luongo (Patriots).

"Never in my wildest dreams could I have thought my name would be anywhere inside the Pro Football Hall of Fame," said Ryan, who spent 48 seasons (1975-2022) working for the Vikings. "To think I'm even a small part of that place — somewhere down the hall from where all the great Vikings players and [coach] Bud [Grant] are — is very special, pretty moving and quite humbling."

It was 1975 when Ryan, 16, a hardworking 98-pound sophomore wrestler at St. Paul Humboldt, was working on the grounds crew at old Midway Stadium and caught the eye of Vikings equipment manager Jim "Stubby" Eason. Eason, who needed strong, cheap labor to help lug equipment to and from Mankato for training camp, took a liking to Ryan. So did Grant.

Ryan continued in this part-time role in 1976. When he graduated, he went to work for the Vikings, officially becoming a full-timer on June 1, 1979, when Eason marked the moment by handing him a can of paint to go paint the blocking sleds.

Eason was the team's original equipment manager. He served from 1961 until his death from lung cancer in 1981. Ryan, then 21, was promoted and would hold the job 42 seasons before his retirement in 2023.

"I miss the people," Ryan said.

He doesn't miss not having a day off for seven months a year.

The Vikings played 909 games from 1979, when Ryan was hired full-time, until 2022. There were 177 preseason games, 701 regular-season games and 31 playoff games.

Ryan missed two games. Two.

He missed a preseason game when his mother, Rita, died. And he missed a regular-season game in 2021 because of COVID-19, snapping a streak of 705 consecutive regular-season and playoff games.

The keys to longevity in the job — besides an old-school work ethic — was being flexible and really studying the idiosyncratic needs and wants of hundreds of players and coaches.

"Stubby used to have a sign over his desk at Midway Stadium that said, 'If we don't have it, you don't need it,'" Ryan said when he retired. "Now, I think if I had a sign to put over the desk at TCO Performance Center, it would say, 'If we don't have it, FedEx will have it here tomorrow.'"

When quarterback Warren Moon arrived from Houston in 1994, Ryan found out from the Oilers' equipment manager that Moon liked three slices of Doublemint gum in his locker on game day. Moon was floored when he saw three pieces in his locker before his first game as a Viking.

When Ryan started, it took only three 26-foot U-Haul trucks to transport equipment to and from Mankato. By 2017, the team's last training camp there, it took seven jam-packed semi-trailers.

Ryan designed the NFL's first eye shield worn by a player when Mark Mullaney had an eye gouged in 1984. He also won the Whitey Zimmerman Award as the NFL's Equipment Manager of the Year in 1996 and 2007.

"When you think about what makes a great team, it's people who put others ahead of themselves," Vikings co-owner and president Mark Wilf said when Ryan retired. "For nearly 50 years, Dennis Ryan did that for the Vikings."

And now he's on his way to Canton, Ohio.

"It's special to me that it's the same year a Vikings player [Jared Allen] is going in," Ryan said. "He's going in with a lot more fanfare than I am. But it's still something I sure wasn't thinking about when they hired me back in 1975."