History hangs heavy over this weekend’s massive Army-Notre Dame showdown. Once upon a time, this was the most famous rivalry in the land, a war that bewitched the entire country. Americans waited anxiously for newspapers, gathered around radios, stared into the glow of massive early television sets to learn which of these titans would claim the year’s finest, most important game.
Army-Notre Dame inspired both the greatest lede in the history of sports journalism — Grantland Rice’s “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again” — and the greatest pregame speech in sports history, Knute Rockne’s “Win one for the Gipper” plea.