If you like stadium schadenfreude, you’ll love this: Seattle is about to pay off the last of its debt on the Kingdome, 15 years after the building was imploded:

Back in 1994, tiles fell from building’s roof, prompting an emergency closure and multimillion dollar fix. It was financed on a 20-year debt payment structure and was set to expire at the end of 2015.

King County Budget Director Dwight Dively confirmed Wednesday the county has collected enough money through hotel and motel taxes to pay off the debt nine months early.

If you’re asking yourself, Wait, how can paying off a stadium that’s been gone a decade and a half be “nine months early”?, well, that’s how bonds work: It’s buy now, pay later, and intentionally so. Everyone knew in 1994, or if not then shortly thereafter, that the Kingdome probably wasn’t going to be around at the end of the debt payments, but it was decided that rather than pay for the whole repair cost in one lump sum, it would make more sense to pay it off over time, so that what King County did.

Neither system is any worse, really, any more than taking out a mortgage to buy a home is any better or worse than paying cash, which is why I’ve previously disparaged “taxpayers are still paying off that pile of rubble!” stories as missing the point. The problem isn’t when the payments are made, but how many of them: Seattle taxpayers have now paid for building the Kingdome ($67 million), repairing the Kingdome ($51 million), demolishing the Kingdome ($10 million), and most of building Safeco Field (about $400 million). That’s a sizable slab of dough, regardless of which structures were still standing when the payments were made.