Trigger cheering

Hi.

Whats the best way to trigger animation at a set time.
The scenario is this.

A crowd is sitting, idling watching a soccer game. Then the team scores and the spectators will abruptly start cheering. and preferably after some time go back to idling.

Mixing one character after the other in the timeline sounds tedious. is there a more efficient way to do this over multiple crows characters?

Looking at iMD’s, still trying to wrap my head around how it works.
But maybe i can make a custom iMD with two behaviors

1 - Idle
2 - Cheering

And under each behavior the iMD can randomly use a set of animation so the crowd doesn’t move identical.
Then i can use the MD recorder. let them stand idle until the time is right and then change to cheering?

Just brainstorming, dont know if that works.