For a Notre Dame Family, a Legacy of Optimism (With an Asterisk or Two) On Thanksgiving weekend in 1964, my older brother, Rich, was a freshman at Notre Dame, home for the weekend and ready to enjoy the culmination of an extraordinary football season for the Irish. Rising from a 2-7 record in 1963 and now under a new coach, Ara Parseghian, Notre Dame was ranked No. 1 in the country with only a final game remaining, against Southern Cal in Los Angeles, to cap off one of the most remarkable turnaround seasons in college football history. With a win, a national title was assured. Notre Dame did not play in bowl games in those days. With the darkness of late fall descending, my brother, father and I huddled around our dining room table in Brooklyn to listen to the action on radio. The game was not on television, amazing as that seems in this era of mass availability of college games. My father, a World War II veteran of more than 30 bombing runs in a B-17, was the living definition of a Notre Dame "subway alumnus." Never able to contemplate the possibility of attending college himself, he connected deeply with Notre Dame, as so many thousands of other Catholic New York kids did in the golden era of college football on radio. He loved to tell the story of listening in 1935 when Notre Dame faced a powerhouse Ohio State team - an early "game of the century" - a tale accompanied by the vivid details of an undersize Irish halfback named Andy Pilney scrambling around and through the Buckeyes defense, despite being constantly knocked silly, to overcome a 13-0 deficit for a last-second 18-13 victory. My father, then 11, would have listened to that game in the orphanage in Rockaway where he grew up. The 1964 game is famous for a crushing, last-minute score by Southern Cal, which demolished Notre Dame's dream season. But in our dining room, and in the abiding lore of Irish fans everywhere, the game turned on a phantom holding call that negated a touchdown. I've never seen the play in question, but why quibble with such long-entrenched outrage? Six years later, I was the Notre Dame student reveling in the glory of an undefeated season, home for Thanksgiving to watch the game with my father and brother as the team headed west for a final game in Los Angeles. We were heavily favored to dismiss a mediocre Trojans team. The national title would subsequently be up for grabs in the Cotton Bowl against Texas, then riding a 30-game winning streak. It's not supposed to rain in Southern California. That day it poured; man, it poured. A flurry of rain-soaked turnovers put Notre Dame behind and, despite a record 526 passing yards from Joe Theismann, a comeback fell short: 38-28. We dispatched Texas in the bowl, of course, which only elevated us to second place, after Nebraska Coach Bob Devaney politicked by saying, "Not even the pope could vote for Notre Dame" in the final poll. Those twin extinguishings of undefeated seasons inside the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum sit like Poe's Raven over Saturday night's match between the teams. Yes, Notre Dame comes in at No. 1 and has shed the curse of the Coliseum on other occasions (1966, 1988). But for Rich and me and many other Notre Dame graduates, experience suggests full restraint of optimism. Notre Dame has staged a stunning run of success this season. Not even mentioned in Sports Illustrated's preseason top 25 (the expertly compiled list includes such notables as N.C. State at 25, Auburn (!) at 24, Georgia Tech at 20, Arkansas (!) at 12, West Virginia at 10, and, of course, U.S.C. at No. 2), the Irish ascended through an unrelenting schedule (as always, no F.C.S. teams at all) to claim the top spot going into this game. By any standard, this has been a spectacular season, win or lose. But win sounds a whole lot better. Teams get relatively few chances to play for the title (unless they inhabit the SEC, with its allowances for over-recruiting players), so it is imperative to break through when the opportunity arises. And there is no doubt that Notre Dame's karma has tilted favorably this season. This always leads to "luck of the Irish" comments from the haters, as though other teams do not experience turns of favorable fate. Maybe Notre Dame asks for some of the opprobrium by pointing out in the midst of this success that if it wins the title this year it will be the first time in B.C.S. history that a college with the highest graduation rate in the nation among its football players is also the champion on the field. For some reason this roils the fans of other institutions, perhaps because it suggests that, despite much evidence to the contrary, you really can compete with legitimate student-athletes. Why this hostility does not attach to Stanford, which proved it again this year, is a mystery. So it is down to this: win Saturday and the title game in Miami - and a likely confrontation with Alabama - awaits. The roster of committed (in several senses of the word) Notre Dame fans and graduates in my family has expanded beyond Rich and me to my daughter, son and son-in-law. My son, Dan, will be at the game Saturday night, skin painted green as usual in big games; my daughter, Caela, and her husband, Greg, have risked the wrath of the gods by making hotel reservations for Miami. Rich will watch the game at his home in Cape Cod, expecting the worst, as am I. I wish I could watch the game with Dad, but he's gone. He was the one in the family who never felt the scourge of U.S.C. disappointment. His experience was forged by his boyhood imagination creating a picture of an Irish back pinballing his way across the field to a win against all odds. Dad always expected Notre Dame to come all the way back. This season would not have surprised him in the least.