It’s crazy how close we were under Charlie Weis.
The things which make it hard to be eleven years old are also the things that make it great: You’re old enough to know how things work, but you’re young enough to lack any trace of perspective. So it was as I turned on the 14-inch TV in my dad’s office to watch Notre Dame play USC on an October Saturday in 2005. It was the biggest deal in my world.
My family was not yet a Notre Dame family at that point. My cousin had graduated there a few years earlier, but he was the only one, and I don’t think any of us in my nuclear family had, to that point, attended a game at Notre Dame Stadium. My brother was a senior in high school, and he was applying to Notre Dame, but we didn’t know if he’d get in. We didn’t know if we were smart enough. We didn’t know if we were good enough for Notre Dame. There’s a story now in the family—and maybe it’s apocryphal—that my dad had looked at tickets for this game but decided against purchase, fearing it would make a potential rejection too sad in a few months’ time. The exclusivity only heightened the sense of magic.
I thought about that USC game two Saturdays ago, driving home from a friend’s apartment after watching his Texas Longhorns knock off Alabama. Before I’d left, another Texas alum in the room had looked up from her phone and—with some softness in her voice—relayed that they’d lit the tower over on campus, meaning the university’s Main Building, a 27-floor structure topped by a carillon, was illuminated in celebratory burnt orange. You can see the tower from the upper level of the interstate, and on my way home I looked across the dark stadium towards its orange light, and I thought of the kids who play football in the grass at Hancock Golf Course wearing Devin Duvernay jerseys, and I remembered being eleven years old. And I was happy for Austin.
Tomorrow, Ohio State comes to Notre Dame Stadium, the best team to visit since at least Clemson in 2020 and possibly since Georgia back in 2017. That Clemson team would go on to be blown out in the playoff semifinal, but Georgia—like USC in 2005—played a national championship classic, albeit in defeat. It’s possible my memory or my historic knowledge is lacking here, but I don’t believe Notre Dame’s beaten a national champion since Florida State in 1993. In an ideal world, this streak won’t break tomorrow. If it does, we won’t find out it has until January. Ohio State is, though—current AP Poll fetish for Michigan aside—a national championship contender, a team who came within a point on New Year’s Eve of beating one of the greatest college football teams history has ever produced. There is a good chance this Buckeye team is one of the three best teams Notre Dame has hosted in the last twenty years.
There’s a Sports Illustrated cover from the fall of 2002 showing Maurice Stovall catching a pass over a Michigan State defender up in East Lansing. I don’t know whether this cover is famous, or if it’s only famous to me because it happened to hang on the wall above my seat in 6th grade computers class (our teacher had the wall adorned with Sports Illustrated covers, which was a very cool thing for a computers teacher in 2005 to do). The cover—heavy with irony now—celebrates Tyrone Willingham’s triumphant beginning in South Bend, reading, just below the magazine’s own name: RETURN TO GLORY, an informal slogan of the early Willingham era. We—and I speak broadly here, only 28 years old myself and not brought up in what was initially a Notre Dame household—have waited for that return to glory for thirty years. It’s been 35 years since we’ve won a national championship, but it’s been thirty since we were good enough to do it. In between there’s been false hope and false starts and an equal share of blowouts and near-misses. There’s been a fake résumé and a fake girlfriend and a quartet of coaches each of whom was undoubtedly at some point justifiably called a fake. The Navy win streak has ended. The ACC partnership has come into the world. There’s been a Champs Sports Bowl and a Camping World Bowl and an Independence Bowl and an Insight Bowl, and a whole bunch of seasons with no bowl at all. We’ve been blown out by JaMarcus Russell and by A.J. McCarron and by Jonathan Smith, and those were some of our best teams of these thirty years. There’s been a goal line stand in the rain against Stanford and a failed comeback in the rain down at Clemson and so much trouble snapping the ball in the rain in Raleigh, and that is an incomplete history of precipitation-affected games in only the Brian Kelly era. There’s been Manti Te’o diving to catch the interception in Norman. There’s been Glenn Earl shaking Chris Rix’s bones in Tallahassee. There’s been Brady Quinn lofting it to Jeff Samardzija at the goal line on a perfect South Bend Saturday in 2005, DJ Fitzpatrick converting the extra point to tie the score at 14, the NBC scorebug rolling up the points one by one on the TV of a kid back in Crystal Lake, Illinois who wanted Notre Dame to win more than anything in the world.
Maybe Ohio State’s not that good. Maybe Ohio State’s so good they run us ragged. But maybe Ohio State’s for real and Notre Dame is too. Maybe, tomorrow and over the weeks ahead, glory returns to Notre Dame Stadium.
Wake up the echoes. Just in case.
