My Aggie loyalty started in high school, when my future alma mater mailed a poster of Bonfire to a ZIP code at the very top of Texas. That was about all the recruiting I received from Aggieland, but it was enough. That poster hung on my wall (between Michael Jordan and a Porsche) and I memorized the only words on it:

Some may boast of prowess bold,

of the school they think so grand.

But there’s a spirit can ne’er be told.

It’s the Spirit of Aggieland.

My enrollment at what was then the third-largest university in the nation was a sea change for me, and a culture shock. It’s when I stitched the High Plains together with the rest of Texas and started to get perspective about the history, personalities and traditions that shape our state. One of those traditions will be renewed Saturday when maroon and burnt orange take the field together, for the first time in 13 years, below the roar of the 12th Man.

This rivalry started in 1894, and was renewed 97 consecutive times from 1915 to 2011. Altogether, the game has been played 118 times. It used to unite the state, and it used to divide families. In recent years, jokes about tension over Thanksgiving dinner because of the A&M-UT game have been replaced by dread of Thanksgiving dinner over political talk. With the election behind us, it’ll be good for Texans to get back to the old ways.

This rivalry has created our state’s own version of mixed marriages. Kevin Scheible, one of my closest friends from college, married a member of the Longhorn Band. Kevin and Sharon live in San Antonio now. They’ve somehow made it work, though it’s an arrangement I would counsel most young lovers to avoid.

A dozen years ago, right around the time the rivalry was being suspended, my Aggie wife and I found ourselves in a Bible study group that was evenly split between Aggies and Longhorns. It included two mixed marriages. Those people are still some of our closest friends. Only the supernatural bonds of the Holy Spirit could have kept us from cracking in half. That, plus we don’t watch the game together.

College football has changed enormously since this game was played last, let alone since it was played first. The crowds are larger. The record size of the 12th Man is 110,663; this game will almost certainly surpass that.

The payouts are bigger too. The era of Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) sponsorships has created a breed that would have been unthinkable in 1894: millionaire college athletes.

Two of the 10 highest paid college athletes in the nation are Longhorn quarterbacks Quinn Ewers and Arch Manning, according to Yahoo! Sports.

In the new Aggie tradition of paying football personalities not to contribute, benched quarterback Conner Weigman will earn his $628,000 NIL valuation from the sideline.

But at least the venue will be simple. The Aggies play at Kyle Field, the state’s largest stadium, named after Texas A&M horticulture professor E.J. Kyle, who created the school’s football field in 1904.

In contrast, the name of the Longhorns’ haunt is something like Campbell-Williams Field at Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium presented by Bud Light in association with Hemp-It-Up-America Political Action Committee.

Both schools have storied programs. The Longhorns have Darrell Royal, Earl Campbell, Ricky Williams and four national championships if you include the one in 1970 when they lost to Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl but United Press International writers awarded them the title anyway because the media loves them. Some things never change.

The Aggies have Bear Bryant, Gene Stallings and Jackie Sherrill (for the purposes of this column, please forget the state of Alabama exists), as well as Heisman Trophy winners John David Crow and Johnny Football Manziel. When I was a student, Aggies claimed just one national championship, back in 1939. But then other schools started putting such achievements in big letters on their stadiums and we demanded a recount. Now, Aggies include the undefeated seasons in 1919 and 1927 under Coach D.X. Bible who later coached at, you guessed it, UT.

The rivalry has included its share of pranks. The official story (and by “official” I mean made up by Aggies) of how UT mascot Bevo got its name is that a group of Aggie students snuck over to Austin one night, long ago, after the horns had lost to A&M 13-0, and branded the cow with the score. In a mascot cover-up, UT students converted the 13 to a B, the – to an E and added a V before the 0 to create the name.

It is true that A&M beat UT 13-0 in 1915, and it’s true that some Aggies branded the mascot. But the brand-conversion part remains unconfirmed and Longhorns refuse to admit the obvious: that this is a terrific story that should live long in Texas lore.

For all the differences between these schools, there is still more that unites us than divides us, as it’s popular to say these days. Both institutions are doing important work in research and molding the next generation of Texas leaders. Aggies and Longhorns love their state. We love our schools. And we would love to see our rivals lose. Both school’s songs mention the other.

That poster on my bedroom wall would be as close as I would come to the real Bonfire until I stood on Duncan Drill Field watching it burn in the fall of 1991. My unit in the Corps of Cadets was known for building Bonfire. We had spent thousands of man hours in exhausting manual labor kindling Bonfire’s purpose: the burning desire to beat the hell outta UT.

I remember watching the news just a few years later, heartbroken by the loss of 12 Aggies who were making their own Bonfire memories when tragedy struck. Aggies everywhere remembered them this week.

Longhorns did too. I’ll never forget how Austin dropped the rivalry taunts and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with grieving Aggies in the wake of that tragedy. UT showed its class that year. The school canceled its Hex Rally, the ritual that traditionally preceded the game. The UT Tower went dark and the Aggie War Hymn was played there — the one that derides the “orange and the white.” It’s the only time in UT history that has happened, I’m told. At the game, the Longhorn Band played Taps, a fitting salute at a school with military roots.

Longhorn coach Mack Brown offered to postpone the game and he said he has shed tears over the loss of those 12 Aggies. His staff organized a blood drive. Brown was a great coach whose players would have run through a wall for him. In November 1999, I think a lot of Aggies would have too.

Two weeks ago, Mrs. Aggie and I attended a gathering sponsored by the Coppell Aggie Moms Club where we got to meet the Texana artist Benjamin Knox. Knox was in the Aggie Cadet Corps just a few years before I was. He went on to paint the school spirit at several Texas institutions, including commissions by the State of Texas, and the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum.

Knox showed us a new painting he created to mark the revival of this Texas Thanksgiving tradition. And because I accosted him after the meeting, he agreed to let The Dallas Morning News reproduce it here.

From a folded poster hung with thumbtacks to a work of art by one of Texas’ great painters, this rivalry has produced a lot of memorable images. If the Aggies don’t run out of time, I look forward to treasuring the image of the Kyle Field scoreboard Saturday, and sharing it with a few of my Longhorn friends.

Editor’s note: Over Sanders’ loud objections, this column was edited for a variety of blatant biases and subtle but consistent grammatical slights (such as the use of “tu”) that did not meet our editorial standards.

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