My friends and I were tailgating before the Notre Dame spring game (the Blue & Gold Game) in 2017 when I was approached with the idea of writing a Notre Dame football cookbook. I had just published my second book the previous fall (The Men We Became: More Echoes From the End Zone, which was a follow up to my first book, Echoes From the End Zone: The Men We Became) and was looking for my next writing opportunity. I had a few projects in mind, one of which I was seventy pages into, but had kind of stalled on it, when Lee Becton approached me with his idea.