SAN FRANCISCO — Before the women’s basketball game at Eastern Washington University on March 8, as the Eagles of E.W.U. faced off against the Montana State Bobcats, attendees were greeted by a 1980s flashback.

Two men on the sidelines surprised the crowd by blasting the British singer Rick Astley’s 1987 hit song “Never Gonna Give You Up” through the gym, while one, dressed as a look-alike in Mr. Astley’s signature trench coat, lip-synched and mugged to the music: a popular prank known as rickrolling.

The stunt, which was also performed before three other basketball games and distilled into a YouTube video, provoked a variety of reactions. Many older spectators looked, by turns, puzzled or irritated. But the under-30 fans danced and sang, happy to participate in a rapidly spreading phenomenon with roots in their favorite medium — the Internet.

Rickrolling is a descendant of an older Internet joke called duckrolling. A Web site or blog post would offer a link to something popular — say celebrity photos or video gaming news — that led unsuspecting viewers to a bizarre image of a duck on wheels.

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For rickrolling, the duck was replaced with the 20-year-old Astley video, and in the last year it has become a hugely successful “meme,” the Internet’s word for an idea repeated across the Web. The video from yougotrickrolled.com has been viewed more than seven million times.

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The “Never Gonna Give You Up” video has been watched over a million times on YouTube — not bad for a song that last had heavy radio play in 1988, when it spent two weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart of the top-selling singles.