No one expected Loyola to win the game. And in fact, on this Thanksgiving Day in 1977 at Memorial Stadium, the Loyola Dons trailed highly-favored Calvert Hall College 12-0 at half-time.

Air horns bellowed into the raw and cloudy morning from the Calvert Hall side, as if anticipating another championship. Red and yellow confetti fell from the stands. The Hall shared a number one ranking in the MSA standings with Poly. So Joe Brune, an intense strategist, tried to motivate his Dons in the locker room.

“We’ve been here before,” said Brune, referring to a last-second, come-from-behind victory against Gilman earlier in the season. “We can do this again.”

But something more than just this coach, this game or this season gave the moment a great gravity. The players felt the weight of an ancient rivalry, as the two schools will again this Thursday when they meet for the 90th time at Ravens Stadium.

“Rivalry that exists between them made the contest the most important on their schedules,” –”Calvert Hall Defeats Loyola,” November 12, 1920, The Baltimore Sun

For participants and fans alike, “Turkey Bowl” games always seem to produce heart-stopping outcomes and lifetime memories. Consider what happened in that 1977 game:

In the second half, Loyola’s elusive quarterback Bernie Bowers started hitting his receivers—Stromberg, Meagher, and John Woytowitz, whom he found standing alone at the Hall’s ten yard line–scoring thirty unanswered points to ruin the Hall’s run for a championship, 30-12.

Upon returning to Blakefield, the team jumped into the indoor pool with their equipment on.

“We’d been crushed the year before, 35-0. We weren’t supposed to be able to do that,” said Bowers. “We were just so happy.”

At this year’s game, both teams will jettison their season records in a winner-take-all showdown. Pride and neighborhood bragging rights are on the line and for the first time since 2002, Calvert Hall has a chance to win the game. For the Dons, a win could salvage a season marred by off the field mistakes.

The rivalry’s ninety years of improbable upsets, incredible performances, and unforgettable plays — along with the even older rivalry between City and Poly — helped shape the football history of a city whose heart lies on the gridiron.

“You can’t remember when you won championships, only whether or not you beat Loyola that year,” said 1981 Calvert Hall graduate Colin Coyle.

“Both teams fought bitterly from start to finish”

     “We started preparing for the game at the begining of every season,” said former Calvert Hall coach Augie Miceli, who still teaches math at Calvert Hall. “We sent someone to check on them every game — to see what they liked to do, identify their tendencies and prepare around that.”

For 35 years, Joe Brune did likewise: “We didn’t have video like they do today.”

“It would be hard to find two teams more evenly matched,” the anonymous Sun reporter wrote. “Both teams fought bitterly from start to finish.”

“In the first fourteen years, there were six scoreless ties,” said retired announcer Vince Bagli, who also attended Loyola in the 1940s. “I saw my first game in 1935.”

Bagli watched Johnny LeBrou score four touchdowns for Calvert Hall in the 1942 game–which the Hall won, 26-18.

“It was the most outstanding performance I‘ve ever seen,” said Bagli, who has witnessed his share of Orioles and Colts games. “None of the touchdowns were closer than 40 yards.”

One game that stands out for John Stewart, Loyola’s dean of students, was 1957.

“Calvert Hall had a line that was bigger than the Colts,” said Stewart, who attended Loyola. “We had a rookie coach who started the game with an onside kick.”

Coach Tracy Mehr had come to Loyola from Georgetown Prep and kept the mighty Calvert Hall Cardinals off balance all afternoon. Loyola scored first by drawing the Cards off side and then, unexpectedly, passing on first down from the five yard line.

Calvert Hall had Franny Grau and Gerry Gray who would both play for Notre Dame. The Cards were coached by the late George Young, who would eventually go on to the NFL and become the General Manager of the 1987 Super Bowl Champion New York Giants.

“They punched it in late,” said Stewart. “The game ended in a 7-7 tie. It was a big upset.”

Mehr would never lose to Calvert Hall. Moving to City College in 1959, Young would beat Mehr’s Dons and mentor a young coach named Joe Brune.

“George Young influenced everything I did,” said Brune who coached Loyola with integrity and grace for thirty-five years.

“Like it had eyes”

The 1969 match-up, the fiftieth anniversary of the game, was fittingly dramatic. Calvert Hall defeated Loyola 17-14 on a last second 42-yard field goal by Phil Marsiglia. Augie Miceli coached the Calvert Hall JV at the time and was working as a spotter that day in the Press Box with announcers Vince Bagli and the late Charlie Eckman.

Loyola had led for most of the game.

“Joe went for a 4th and one and didn’t get it,” said John Stewart. “The Hall scored to tie the game.” Calvert Hall moved the ball into Loyola territory as time ran down. Phil Marsiglia had practiced kicks all season on the Calvert Hall stadium field out of sight from head coach Lou Carlozo, who had no idea he could kick a ball that far. But Miceli had watched him boom kicks.

In the first game, Calvert Hall star Lou Walker, a “husky” fullback, scored all nine points in the Hall’s 9-3 win. Loyola’s quarterback had been suspended for the game because he’d failed to learn his ablative absolute in Latin class.

“That kid can make this kick,” said Miceli to Bagli and Eckman. When the referee signaled “good,” Eckman quipped, “that ball went through the uprights like it had eyes.”

As it happened, Don Shula and the 1969 Colts were in attendance. They had scheduled a practice after the game.

“Imagine that,” said Miceli, “making an NFL-style field goal in front of Don Shula and the rest of the Baltimore Colts.”

“If you lose special teams, you lose the game”

In 1983, Loyola had won every game leading up to Thanksgiving Day. They’d won the championship outright, and only Calvert Hall stood between the Dons and a perfect season. As he prepared for the game, Calvert Hall coach Augie Miceli believed he had an edge with his special teams.

In the book, “Darrell Royal Talks Football,” the Hall of Fame Texas coach writes about teams needing to win two-out-of-three aspects of the game: offense, defense, and special teams—in order to prevail. For Miceli, that book was a bible and one quote stuck with him: “If you lose special teams, you lose the game.”

Calvert Hall scored on a punt return to draw first blood. Loyola took a 14-8 lead late in the fourth quarter. Miceli canvassed each member of his coaching staff on how to return the kick-off. One coach told him to run it up the middle, another said to run right, and the last coach told Miceli to run the reverse.

“That’s it!” Miceli shouted, but they didn’t have a reverse in the playbook. They had run it once a week in practice to keep the special teams on their game. “We got real good at it, but we just made it up.”

Gerrick MacPhearson took the exchange and raced down the field to the Loyola three yard line. Calvert Hall scored and ruined Loyola’s perfect season.

“He’s a good honest guy”

In 2000, Joe Brune’s next to last year as coach, the two teams played to a scoreless tie on a crisp sunny day in Ravens Stadium. Calvert Hall scored on their first possession of overtime and kicked an extra point. Loyola responded and lined up for a two-point conversion to win the game.

“He wanted to win the game,” said Bagli. “He’s a good honest guy who wanted to win fair and square.” The pass fell incomplete and the Dons lost.

“It was not the best coaching strategy,” said Brune, putting the blame on himself. “We’d practiced the play all year, but the quarterback had to throw off balance.”

Brune played for Loyola in the Turkey Bowl in the 1950s and was followed by his two sons. His involvement with the game spans five decades. He coached Loyola with humility, grace, and a style reminiscent of Joe Paterno–pacing the sidelines with a brooding intensity.  He and Vince Bagli remain good friends.

“We sometimes wore special jerseys for the game. I remember Vince yelled at me once for having yellow numbers on blue jerseys,” he said. “’Don’t ever do that again,’ Vince told me. “I can’t see the numbers.”

“Get the Birds feathers plucked, cook the Cards”

In John Stewart’s office in Knott Hall at Loyola, he presides over a desk covered with Turkey Bowl programs from the past four decades.

“I played on the same field that the Colts won the 1959 championship,” he said. “You never forget running out of that tunnel.”

After the Colts left Baltimore for Indianapolis in 1984, the Thanksgiving Day games were all the city had—not the Redskins or the Indy team. Described as a football town with a baseball problem, Baltimore played a major role in launching the modern day NFL, with its televised championships in 1958 and 1959. It was this city’s unrelenting passion for football that brought the Ravens here.

The Turkey Bowl helped stoke that passion. It brings generations of families together, fathers and sons, and ardent supporters of both schools. Like many sons whose fathers attended both schools, I’ve attended games with my father since I was five years old—and the ritual of an early pre-game breakfast in a greasy spoon somewhere downtown persists to this day.

Stewart shows me one of this year’s programs. It’s filled with ads for local businesses, friends and relatives cheering on players and the schools. “Roll Dons Roll,” “Beat the Hall,” and “Dump the Dons” are a few of the slogans that appear every year. The massive bonfires and pep rallies of yesteryear, phased out due to liability concerns, have been replaced by bull roasts for alumni on the night before the game.

Like a detective, John Stewart scours every advertisement. He shows me one from 1972.

“Get the feathers plucked, cook the cards,” it reads. He folds the page in half and the phrase reduces to three unpleasant words. He’s also looking for anything with “FTD” in it. In this intense rivalry, those letters have nothing to do with flowers.

“Every once in a while one slips through,” said Stewart.

Bernie Bowers and Brant Hall, two assistant football coaches and former players stop in. They are part of Brian Abbott’s staff and will one day follow in the footsteps of Young, Miceli, and Brune.

“They’re playing very well,” said Hall, whose Loyola teams beat Calvert Hall every year he attended Loyola. “Calvert Hall has some good young talent. We don’t know who we are yet.”

Hall, it turns out, has experienced some famous rivalries. As a student at Lehigh University, he played in one of the oldest college football rivalries in the nation: Lehigh vs. Lafayette.

“Still,” he said, anticipating Thursday’s match-up when the Dons again face off with Calvert Hall, “nothing compares to this game.”