Sam Malone had enough with the hysteria caused by a so-called magic scale that “Coach” bought for the bar during Season 2, Episode 17 of the great television show “Cheers.”

When someone stood on the scale, it spit out a fortune, and the gang at the bar was believing in the magic. They were being driven crazy by it.

Finally, Sam, the bar owner, stepped in for some real talk.

“The scale is not magic,” he emphatically told the group. “You can’t take it seriously. And I’ll tell you something, it’s a sad world we live in when Sam Malone becomes the voice of reason.”

That is a quote my friend Joe Stimatz brought up to me when Matt Vincent and I wrote columns to laugh at the pie-in-the-sky “Destination Montana” scheme when it was floated to us by a snake-oil salesman in 2003.

“It’s a sad world we live in when Vinny and Foles become the voice of reason,” Joe said.

I had not thought about Destination Montana for years until it was brought up to me recently by two different people in a matter of a couple of days.

The first guy brought it up to compliment me. He said Vinny and I saw right through what should have been obvious to everyone else.

The other guy mentioned Destination Montana because he was ready to take a swing at me.

For those not old enough to remember, let’s recap what Destination Montana was all about when it was introduced to us in February of 2003.

The first part of the plan was easy, they said. All we had to do was get the Montana Legislature to grant Butte the right to have wide-open gambling in a section of the uptown. Bars would be able to stay open 24 hours, like in Las Vegas.

Bars on the Flats — and the rest of the state — still had to close at 2 a.m., and they couldn’t have wide-open gambling.

They said they would give one of the 10 casinos to Montana’s Indian tribes to share in an effort to appease the concerns of our lawmakers and our Native Americans.

That was going to happen just as soon as we brought peace to the Middle East. The tribes were never going to agree to that, and the very anti-Butte legislature was not going to go out on a limb for the Mining City.

The plan also needed money. Lots of money. The price tag was a $1.8 billion, a sticker price that at the time would have seemed crazy to Dr. Evil.

How were they going to get that money? They were going to tell us later.

In addition to the 10 major casinos, the plan called for 40 music halls, three PGA golf course, an amusement park, a training facility to lure NFL teams to come to Butte for their training camps and a partridge in a pear tree.

All of this was somehow said with a straight face.

Our council of commissioners voted to support the plan. Chief Executive Judy Jacobson supported the plan, though she seemed skeptical. The editor and publisher of The Montana Standard — our bosses — supported the plan.

Vinny and I also would have supported the plan — if we thought for one second that the plan was real. After all, we liked to go to the bars, and we disagreed at the time with the state-mandated closing at 2 a.m. We liked to gamble. We liked music. We liked amusement parks. We liked the NFL. We liked to golf.

But the plan did not pass the smell test. We saw that many in our community were falling for it out of desperation. At the time, we were losing the Montana Power Co., and the future economy of Butte was not looking good.

Destination Montana was giving false hope to people who did not have hope in a long, long time. We recognized that a shady character was pulling on the heartstrings of our fellow citizens, and we could not believe that the same shady character was about to get the key to our beloved home town.

So, Vinny and I stepped up to sound the alarm. We spoke up to state what should have been the obvious. This thing was not real. We called out Destination Montana for what it was. A pipe dream.

We didn’t stop the plan. The legislature and common sense eventually prevailed to end a plan that never had a chance in the first place.

In fact, I believe the snake-oil salesman never intended for the plan to take off. He was using the people of Butte for headlines to take to his next scam in a different city.

No, we were not very tactful in calling out the plan. We were not nice to the people who believed in it, and that is regretful. But we were telling the truth, and sometimes the truth has to be delivered in a brutal fashion for people to hear it.

Still, we were called names by many people. We could have papered walls in hour homes with the angry — and sometimes threatening — letters we received. One prominent real estate agent left me a voice mail calling me “anti-Butte.”

She never apologized when our words proved to be true.

Then, 21 years went by without hardly a thought of Destination Montana. The scam faded away with hardly a whimper.

In April of this year, though, a similar man came to speak to our Council of Commissioners about building a nuclear reactor out by REC Silicon, which had recently announced its plans for a partial closure because of high electricity prices.

This small nuclear reactor would save the company. It would also sell cheap electricity to the mine, ensuring that Butte would be prosperous for decades to come.

Our chief executive called it “real,” citing the expertise of his father-in-law, who is a nuclear engineer. Some of our commissioners also bought the plan and were ready to give the key to the city to a guy they had previously never met or Googled.

There was one small problem with the plan. Nearly every word that the guy with the nuclear plan said at the meeting of the Council of Commissioners turned out to be false.

As I Googled and texted questions to people who would know better during the meeting, I was reminded of the words of Joe in 2003.

“It’s a sad world we live in when Foles becomes the voice of reason.”

A few days later, Tom Lutey, a reporter for The Billings Gazette, exposed the plan as not real.

The next time I thought about Destination Montana was a couple of weeks ago when, while walking my dogs, I ran into the man who was happy to praise Vinny and me in hindsight.

Three days later, I ran into a guy who used to work as an electrician with my dad. He put his finger in my face as he told me that I “ran thousands of jobs out of town” because I didn’t support Destination Montana.

He told me that he would have choked me if he would have seen me in 2003. The look on his face made me believe he was thinking of such an attempt presently.

Since I did not have the power to approve or deny anything in the plan, I was puzzled by this. I also thought that I need to come up with something to sell this guy.

If he stills believe in Destination Montana 21 years after the plan was exposed as the unrealistic pipe dream that it was, then it is not out of the question that he would pay top dollar for a bridge.

It’s never fun to be the “voice of reason.” But 21 years after Destination Montana, I am pretty damn proud that Vinny and I had the guts to give it a try.

Even if it almost got me choked out.

— Bill Foley, who is willing to risk a choking or two for sticking up for his hometown, can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74. Listen to him on the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.