BATON ROUGE, La. -- On Saturday night, Nov. 20, 1971, Baton Rouge was cool, sticky and whitened by wisps of fog. Throughout the nation, television sets came alive with color (!) imagery of the evening broadcast from LSU's Tiger Stadium via the bulky cameras of ABC Sports. Even bulkier was the offensive line of Notre Dame, the No. 7 team in the nation, pushing the 14th-ranked LSU Tigers to the brink of their own goal line, the Irish seemingly set to push their way into the end zone for a game-tying score.
One of those flickering TV sets was in a living room in Larose, a town that hangs onto the lower edges of Louisiana, where the map becomes more blue than green and the next town to the south is named Cut Off.