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Tomorrow night, Mariah’s Challenge will reach a milestone when it hands out its 500^th scholarship.

That will bring the total money handed out in 17 years to $500,000.

That total might surprise some of the many doubters and naysayers who spoke up so forcefully when Mariah’s Challenge was launched in 2008, but it was not surprising at all to me. I stood in the back of St. Ann’s Church and saw the look on Leo McCarthy’s face when he made the promise that turned out to be Mariah’s Challenge.

I did not doubt it for a second.

Mariah’s Challenge rose from the ashes of an unspeakable tragedy that occurred early in the morning of Oct. 28, 2007. That is when an underage drunk driver ran over three 14-year-old girls as they walked on a path next to Blacktail Lane in Butte.

Mariah McCarthy was flown to a hospital in Missoula, where she was pronounced dead. Her friends, Valerie Kilmer and Kaitlyn Okrusch, were badly injured, but survived.

On Nov. 1, a stunned community packed St. Ann’s for Mariah’s funeral. During the eulogy Leo delivered for his daughter, he turned to the friends of Mariah and her sister Jenna and made a promise.

He said if they do not drink while underage and never got into a vehicle with someone who had been drinking, he would make sure they had some scholarship money.

“Mariah’s Challenge is be the first generations of Butte kids to not drink,” he told them.

He thought he was talking to just a small group of friends. Little did he know, the whole community was listening, and Mariah’s Challenge turned out to be something bigger than anyone could have imagined.

Now, 17 and a half years after the tragedy, Mariah’s Challenge is still going strong.

In 2007, the tragedy that took Mariah shook Butte and the entire State of Montana. Never have I seen where a community turned to the father the victim of a tragedy for comfort and healing.

It was a horribly unfair position to be put into, but Leo delivered in a big, big way.

With help of many, Leo moved forward. He said he struggled to breathe some days, but he somehow kept getting up and making each day count. He set out to change a dangerous culture and mindset that accepted underage drinking and drinking and driving as something we all just do sometimes.

On Feb. 8, 2008, Butte High and Anaconda met for a basketball girls-boys doubleheader at the Butte Civic Center. The gym was packed for the nightcap that pitted the Bulldogs girls, the No. 1-ranked team in the Class AA, against the Copperheads, the top-ranked team in the Class A.

Before the girls tipped off, Leo addressed the crowd to officially launch Mariah’s Challenge. Hundreds of boys and girls wore Mariah’s Challenge T-shirts with the words “Butte Against Drunk Driving” on the front and “I Accept Mariah’s Challenge” on the back.

In April of 2009, the first 31 recipients of the Mariah Daye McCarthy Scholarship were honored. Leo was blown away with the number of students who applied for the scholarship.

More importantly, he was so moved by the essays the applicants wrote, baring their souls to show the impact Mariah’s Challenge made in their young lives. So, instead of handing out a handful of scholarships, he decided to give $1,000 to all the applicants.

There was no way, he said, to distinguish between them.

This year, 17 recipients bring the number of “Mariah’s Messengers,” as Leo calls them, to 500.

The 2025 scholarship winners are Tirzah Bergren, James Bradshaw, Kyle Kinsey, Audrey Kish, Chelsi Lyons, Justus McGee, Kolbe Michaud, Michael Peck, Ryan Popovich, Sam Sampson, Kieran Scarff, Macy Seaholm, Murphy Sullivan, Peyton Trabert, Brea Wagner, Jordyn Yelenich and Carter Barsness.

Michaud will graduate from Jefferson High School in Boulder. The rest are from Butte.

Like with the first 31 honorees, this year’s scholarship winners melted hearts with testimonials as to why they accepted Mariah’s Challenge and how they, despite some stacked odds, lived up to that promise.

Each one is touching in its own way.

That illustrates why the number 500 is more important than the $500,000. When you put names and faces to those numbers, 500 somehow seems like the bigger number, and it is a number worth celebrating.

The celebration is about the 500 lives that have been shaped, at least in small part, by Mariah’s message. That message has reached far beyond the borders of Silver Bow County and the Treasure State, too.

The message was so strong that it led to Leo being named one of the “All-Stars Among Us” by People Magazine. It is why was voted to represent the Seattle Mariners at the Major League Baseball All-Star game in St. Louis in 2009, when the stars from the American League and National League marveled over Leo and his fellow heroes.

Three and a half years later, Leo was on national television as a CNN Hero.

“I think Mariah’s Challenge is something that makes people think a little bit more to say, ‘We can be better,’” Leo said on CNN in December of 2012. “Mariah is forever 14. I can’t get her back, but I can help other parents keep their kids safe. If we save one child, we save a generation.”

He has saved so much more than that. By 2014, Mariah’s Challenge had been adopted in more than 40 high schools around the country. In addition to the scholarship winners or the many other students who accepted the challenge, adults were paying attention, too.

“It was time to look in the reflection and say, ‘We can be better,’” Leo said on CNN.

We have done better. The culture has changed. It has not changed enough, but we have made significant strides when it comes to drinking and driving.

When it comes to drunk driving deaths, you can only count the losses. We cannot possibly count which lives that were saved. We cannot accurately measure the victories.

But do not be mistaken. Those victories are there.

There will be the 17 of them on display Wednesday when the Mariah Daye McCarthy Scholarship is awarded during a ceremony that starts at 6 p.m. at the Montana Tech Library Auditorium.

The number 17, though, is only the beginning. Even more people have been watching as these incredible young men and women set an example. The little brothers and sisters. The younger cousins. The neighborhood kids.

They will all learn from watching the 2025 Mariah’s Messengers.

Like with Leo and Mariah’s Challenge, these 17 have made a difference. They have changed lives. They have saved lives.

When we lose someone young, like we did with Mariah in 2007, we lose everything that person could become. We lost her children and her grandchildren. We lost their children and grandchildren.

But that works the other way, too. When we save lives — even the ones we do not know we saved — we get so much more back.

That is what Mariah’s Challenge has done. Even if the challenge went away tomorrow, it has already impacted generations to come.

This movement, however, has not been easy. Leo, his wife Janice and their daughter Jenna relive the tragedy over and over every year that they hand out scholarships in a quest to reach as many people as possible.

None of the scholarship winners are old enough to remember. They were babies when Mariah was taken from us. But it will hit home with them.

For those of us old enough to remember, we will be taken back to that tragic day and the sad days, weeks and months that followed.

I have no idea how they are strong enough to do it, but we should all be thankful that they do. This is something they feel must be done, and our community — and beyond — is better because of it.

Back when he was on CNN, Leo said he will continue with Mariah’s Challenge until we no longer need it. Unfortunately, that day had not arrived, so the mission moves forward.

Leo will continue to lead the painful fight because the future generations need him to. Mariah’s Messengers need him to.

“They’re worth it,” Leo said of those Messengers last week as he looked toward the 17^th scholarship ceremony. “They’re worth every tear and every smile.”

— Bill Foley can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74 or Bluesky at @foles74.bsky.social. Listen to him on the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.