SOUTH BEND, Ind. – This was Lou Holtz’ finest hour. The ’93 Notre Dame football team he commands had won the meetings of 9-and-nothings, whipping Florida State 31-24. Now Irish eyes have only Boston College ahead for a letter-perfect, 11-0 march.

In this gaudiest of college football holidays, the Fat Lady got to sing when Charlie Ward’s bombsight-accurate throw got batted down and left the Seminoles dead on Notre Dame’s 14-yard line. Then, and only then, did the Catholics cease working their rosary beads.

This was a 72-hour Irish holiday with a history-making football bout thrown in for full measure.

John Banks said Frank Lipps and his son, Randall, they being Elkhart, Ind., folk, had us engaged to attend the pre-game Notre Dame Quarterback Club luncheon. The elder Lipps, a bouncy, feisty, devoted Notre Damer at heart, owned $16 million in land and building properties in Elkhart and South Bend at one time or another. He is a very big man on compus.

The luncheon crowd of 2,600 hooted and cheered when Holtz was introduced and confidently asserted, “We’re not intimidated by Florida State. I expect we will play a good football game.” This should have been warning enough even though the unbeaten Seminoles had been established as huge favorites to topple the Irish.

There are few places on earth, if another even comes close, like Notre Dame on Big Game Day. This is not to say it is the only campus of ethereal beauty and as magnetic. The grace and beauty of Bowdoin College and the stately pines surrounding its football field comes to mind. However, big game day at South Bend begins on Thursday, gathers momentum on Friday and peaks at kick-off time on Saturday.

It is a pilgrimage, a religious experience. Even those Catholics who have not gone to mass in years visit the grotto and the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. Notre Dame is, has been and will be the football team of Roman Catholics, and it is not just the Irish.

It is the Slovaks, the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Orientals, everybody. Many, many of Notre Dame’s exceptional football talent, like many of Ireland’s great patriots, have been and are Protestant.

Until this most recent Irish holiday, I’d never before left the breakfast table to make a 1:47 p.m. kickoff. Big Game Day at Notre Dame means walking the campus, the same hallowed ground bearing the footprints of Knute Rockne, Frank Leahy, the Four Horsemen and all the others. It’s a game day tradition.

The pilgrimage is a parade of folk, young and old, the former individuals being men who likely dreamed when they were young of playing football here. The chances are they didn’t make it for reasons of size, lack of height, weight and speed, or economics. Perhaps.

The venerable sports writer and human encyclopedia of Notre Dame football, Joe Doyle, wrote of other big games 48 hours before the 1993 version. “The Irish, more commonly referred to as the Catholics in 1915, walloped Army 39-13, on a vaunted Gus Dorias-to-Knute Rockne passing attack,” he said. That was a monster game because throwing a football as an offensive weapon was born during that 39-13 Irish victory.

Hardly could football history expect to record, 78 years later, that a young man named Charlie Ward would exploit the passing game with such success and splendor on the founder’s home turf. In defeat, the young man put himself into Notre Dame’s memory books for a showy exhibition of skill, poise, physical and mental toughness.

Who can ever forget Ward on the Irish 14-yard line with his gun cocked, three seconds to live, only to misfire when his pass scaled off a defender’s finger tips? This was high drama, the epitomy of great football theater.

Some of the 800 communicators have written and said this was Notre Dame’s “greatest” gridion victory. Maybe so. Maybe not. Who among Notre Dame followers can ever forget the Irish’ first-ever 1973 meeting with Alabama in the Sugar Bowl. The lead changed hands seven times and the strategy more. In the end, a 35-yard forward pass out of the end zone enabled the Irish to hold tight, a 24-23 bowl victory to go along with an 11-0 season.

By any rule, though, the one played this last Saturday before 59,000 fans, another 20,000 in the parking lots, 8,000 watching the match of unbeatens on closed-circuit television in the nearby athletic and convention center, and a record 800 media viewers made for a splendid Irish holiday.

Big games? There have been many inside this giant arena made of 2 million bricks and mortar. Few, if any, shone more brightly than the smash and forward thrust of this 1993 Notre Dame offensive line or featured the individual brilliance of the losers like Charlie Ward. This was in every sense a marvelous spectacle contested in an environment and atmosphere where football tradition is deeper and older than sin.

Gatherers of college football memorabilia would call this one a collector’s gem, one to be centered on a coffee table and never allowed to be stained by dust.