JUNCTION CITY -- After the holiday meal, when the adults settled in for long conversations, the Wilcox and Herbert boys would dip out the back door, football in hand.
"You're not going to go sit with the old people," said Josh Wilcox, who played tight end at Oregon from 1993-96. "You're going to go out and play, get dirty."
On a patch of grass next to the Wilcox household east of Junction City, only a few football fields away from the Willamette River, they'd begin a game sparked by a friendship at the University of Oregon in the 1960s.