There aren’t a lot of firsts at Notre Dame. This was one of them

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Thirteen hours before the first college football game of its kind, with snow lacquering everything and bitter cold keeping it there, the cars and trucks lined Angela Boulevard. Predawn arrivals seeking prime tailgating locations when the Notre Dame Stadium lots opened at 8 a.m. Hundreds of them, according to one attendant on duty. And, well, what would a historical moment for this sport be without a little embellishment?

On Friday night, the new 12-team College Football Playoff opened with its most alluring feature: a postseason game hosted on campus. Indiana visiting Notre Dame for a first-round matchup. For all of the game’s pageantry and lore, nobody had ever tried this, so everybody was left to guess how it would turn out. A deep breath of anticipation for good football — and, frankly, lots of money spent on good times — held all the way until kickoff.

There aren’t a lot of firsts anymore in college football. There sure aren’t a lot of firsts at Notre Dame. This was one of them.

“I’ve never been a part of an environment like that,” Irish head coach Marcus Freeman said after a 27-17 win sent his group to a quarterfinal matchup with Georgia on Jan. 1. “Not many times in life you’re the first to do something.”

In the previous 94 years and two months, ever since Knute Rockne had the sod from old Cartier Field removed and placed amid the 2 million-plus bricks constituting the new Notre Dame Stadium, there had not been a college football game played here on a Friday. And since Rockne supervised the parking and traffic patterns back then, we might assume he was happy to watch this all unfold from a safe, celestial distance.

Those alive and well were left to plan for the unprecedented. This sport had staged any kind of playoff only since 2014, when a four-team mini-tournament replaced the Bowl Championship Series system of voters and computers selecting two teams to play for a national championship. In either setup, the games forever took place on neutral ground, always in warm-weather or climate-controlled stadiums.

High stakes. Packed stands. Zero character.

The 12-team Playoff bracket, conceived over a year and a half and formally approved two years ago, at last brought the competition to campus doorsteps in 2024. Or four of them, anyway, in State College, Pa., and Austin, Texas, and Columbus, Ohio, and, of course, northern Indiana. That the very first host happened to be a school started out of a log chapel by priests from France and Ireland, a place awash in college football lore, was maybe a little less mystical than it seemed; one of the architects of the expanded Playoff and its idiosyncrasies was Jack Swarbrick, who was Notre Dame’s athletic director until he retired in March.

In short, this place helped make this happen. Then it had to figure out what to do once it did.

So Notre Dame started with its student body and worked backward.

For all the boxes the university needed to check to pull off this playoff game, from winterizing the facility to figuring out ticket allocations, none of it mattered without making sure its nearly 9,000 undergraduate students could be there. If Notre Dame Stadium is a college football cathedral, the student body occupies its most important pews. When Notre Dame played through the COVID season of 2020, it did so only after ensuring students could attend games. From that perspective, maybe this wasn’t such a heavy lift.

All Notre Dame had to do? Alter its school calendar because of football before a single game had been played.

“You don’t want to assume anything,” said Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua, who replaced Swarbrick in the spring. “So we’re having conversations over the summer saying, ‘OK, if we’re lucky enough and fortunate enough to have a great season and to host a Playoff game, here’s what we need to change.’”

Dorms would stay open an extra 24 hours, closing Sunday at noon instead of the traditional Saturday. The exam schedule changed, too, ending a day earlier on Thursday. No need to go straight from that Theology final to the tailgate in the stadium lot.

Student tickets were priced at $25 and sold out. Every other ticket sold, too, from premium seating along the sideline with blue chair backs ($250) to upper bowl corners ($100) where you can see Touchdown Jesus between plays. While Notre Dame wouldn’t keep the ticket revenue — that goes back to the College Football Playoff — it didn’t want a takeover by Indiana fans, either.

Based on the secondary market, the plan worked. Twenty hours before kickoff, the get-in price from Notre Dame-Indiana was $650, more than 10 times SMU–Penn State and more than five times Tennessee–Ohio State. “You’re only going to have a chance to do this once for the first time,” Bevacqua said. “Hopefully we’re back here next year doing it again, but it will only be the first time once.”

As Bevacqua detailed Notre Dame’s operations three-and-a-half days before kickoff, Christmas carols played over the stadium sound system. On the library lawn across the road, ESPN’s “College GameDay” had begun construction of its set. But a festive spirit — combined with some heavy lifting — was hardly unique to campus grounds.

Typically, the end of college football means the end of big-money weekends for the community. Locals joke that a “permacloud” hovers over the region in the winter months; that relative dreariness extends to the bottom line for businesses, too.

Then: a College Football Playoff game. In December. “They rely on those six (football) weekends,” said Jeff Jarnecke, the executive director of Visit South Bend Mishawaka, discussing the local economic impact. “The idea of a seventh becomes our Super Bowl or Taylor Swift effect.”

On any given day, a hotel room in the area runs about $120 per night, Jarnecke said. For a Friday night with a Playoff game? Double that, easily, and it’s probably closer to five times that rate in many spots. Multi-bedroom Airbnbs and VRBOs? A solid $2,000, at least, for the weekend. At Peggs, a breakfast and lunch spot located a half-block from Notre Dame’s team hotel in downtown South Bend, the previous high-water weekend — in more than two decades of operating — was Stanford’s visit in mid-October. A night game on Saturday bled into the “busiest day we’ve ever had” on that Sunday, per owner Peg Dalton.

For a Playoff week? There were chairs and heaters set up outside in the very likely event the game created a wait that set a new standard.

Inside the Linebacker Lounge — a bar founded by Fighting Irish linebacker Mo Pottios in 1962 and an unapologetically sticky conduit to blurry nights since — four tubs of souvenir shirts clogged the path to the ATM. “YOU ALWAYS WIN AT THE LINEBACKER” went the slogan on the back, nestled between Notre Dame and Indiana helmets. The phone had been ringing for a week and a half with orders for the shirt, from near and far.

Outside, three trailers kept more than 60 beer kegs cold. It was roughly twice as much as the usual stockpile for a game, with good reason. Three buses were set to leave Chicago on Friday morning, general manager Chantal Porter said during an already buzzing midweek lunch hour. The haunt at the corner of Angela Boulevard and South Bend Avenue was their destination.

Porter wasn’t sure if the group comprised Indiana fans or Notre Dame fans or both. She just knew they were coming. “We know it’s going to be crazy,” Porter said, with holiday lights strung overhead and Bob Marley playing on the speakers. “We just don’t know when.”

It was a fan scramble no one could accurately measure before it happened.

Alex Donovan restarted the text chain in late October after Notre Dame’s 51-14 blowout of Navy at Met Life Stadium: This might be happening. So what are we going to do about it? Because for Donovan’s friend group of 2020 Notre Dame graduates, getting back to campus for a home Playoff game felt like a sacred obligation that required Airbnb, good fortune and flexible standards.

They’ll convene from New York, Boston, San Francisco and Chicago. The guy from Houston bailed for this but was already planning to drive to New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl if Notre Dame won. They all have tickets thanks to the alumni lottery. The group knows how to get into a big game after knocking out Ohio State last year and Clemson the season before that.

Ticket acquisition went well enough that Danny Felton, a member of the group, offered two ducats to his brother and his brother’s fiancee … even though they’re Indiana graduates. “I’ve been to the same number of IU home football games as he has: one,” Felton said. “Going on the road to watch IU play? This isn’t something most of those fans have ever done.”

Count the Rev. Patrick Hyde among them. Most Sundays he’s the lead pastor at St. Paul Catholic Center in Bloomington, where he befriended Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti’s wife, Manette. But Hyde is also a graduate student at Notre Dame.

“I’ll be wearing my Dominican Friar habit and many layers underneath, then an IU stocking cap and scarf,” Hyde said. “If I was going by myself, I would be a little nervous. But I feel if there’s one place a priest can go and be ribbed in a wholesome way, it’s Notre Dame.”

About 200 miles separate the schools. One program is a monolith. The other is an upstart. When thousands of Indiana fans arrived on Notre Dame’s turf, it could’ve been a culture clash. College football class warfare.

But this wasn’t an invasion. It was more like a group hug.

On gameday eve at Corby’s, another quintessential Notre Dame watering hole, “Rudy” — a movie directed by an Indiana graduate — played on a projector screen hung directly above a banner that read “Welcome Hoosiers!” Joe Mittiga, the owner and Indiana Class of 1999 graduate, wore a crimson hoodie as he worked the bar during an alumni happy hour for his alma mater. A small band of Notre Dame fans knocked back a shot with a guy wearing an Indiana hat.

Corby’s wasn’t turning into an Indiana hub for the weekend. “Let’s get that one on the record,” Mittiga said with a smile. But it didn’t have to be a battleground, either.

“It’s like Woodstock in here,” Mittiga said. “I think there’s going to be so much more to celebrate at the end of this game than there is to lament about who lost. I really believe that. I wish they didn’t have to play each other right away, but if they didn’t play each other, we wouldn’t have this feeling. … This is a once-in-a-lifetime deal.”

The scenery certainly cooperated. Flurries started late Thursday, spat out by a clipper system crossing the upper Midwest. It dropped a couple inches of snow by the time it was done, giving the Rockne statue outside the north stadium gate a tuft of white flakes. Add on a sub-20 degree wind chill, and the day-of buildup slowed a bit. But there was no outright stopping it.

The more impatient among the early tailgathers dispatched passengers, armed with lawn chairs, to walk in and stake a claim before vehicles were permitted into the lots. The Linebacker likewise opened at 8 a.m. and a small group of patrons were already queued up. A short walk away, macrobrew tall boys were available for purchase outside O’Rourke’s Public House well before noon. At the Embassy Suites situated a stone’s throw from the stadium, “special event parking” went for a ripe $200.

And, yes, everyone seemed happy to be here.

Too many groups of mixed allegiance to count. At least a couple tailgates flew flags for both schools. Hoosiers fans snapped selfies outside the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. Two baristas at the bustling student center Starbucks wore Indiana sweatshirts. (To avoid lagging service, a sign announced that blended drinks were unavailable. A Playoff game at Notre Dame was many things, but not Frappucino-friendly.) The language got a bit salty among fans waiting to fill the backdrop for ESPN’s “College GameDay” set, but even those swear words were delivered with a smile.

By dusk, snowball fights were underway near the hockey arena. The lots were jammed. The libations seemingly kicked in, with fans hollering at each other — in solidarity or otherwise — on the sidewalks and across the streets. Notre Dame walked into its stadium behind bagpipers and flanked by hundreds in the dark. Curt Cignetti cursed on live television. It finally felt like the party it was shaped to be. Shared celebration, all the way through: Playoff rules meant Indiana’s entrance video played on Notre Dame’s video board, and the Hoosiers marching band performed at halftime. Crimson-wearers in the crowd surely surpassed the 3,500 tickets officially allotted to the visitors.

And that was about that for the hospitality.

Notre Dame stuffed Indiana’s offense until the Hoosiers ground out a couple garbage-time scores. The Irish offense, meanwhile, inflicted more than enough paper cuts to bleed out their guests. There were more actual fireworks Friday than on-field fireworks. By the end, the online discourse about the Hoosiers’ worthiness was arguably noisier than the stadium, “Hoosier Daddy” chants notwithstanding.

It probably wasn’t the grandest of openings. But it was a first. It was enough to wonder why it took so long to get here, and to appreciate that it happened at all.

As midnight approached, a pair of Sugar Bowl reps handed Freeman a game ball as a symbolic invitation to their New Year’s Day quarterfinal game. Notre Dame’s coach duly played along — “Invitation accepted,” he noted — before reimmersing in the moment.

“Tonight,” Freeman said, “is about tonight.”

(Illustration: Will Tullos / The Athletic: Photos: Justin Casterline, Joe Robbins / Getty Images)