Anyone who attends a football game on the University of Notre Dame campus and doesn’t feel the hair on the back of his or her neck stand up when the Fighting Irish Marching Band makes its pre-game entrance into the legendary stadium isn’t a college football fan.

Even if you claim to be the biggest Notre Dame football detractor on the face of the earth, you cannot truly say that you would not be captivated by what occurs on several fall Saturday afternoons each year in South Bend, Ind.

As we sat high in the east end of the stadium among a huge throng of University of North Carolina football faithful last Saturday, my wife and I had full view of the Golden Dome and “Touchdown Jesus” (the mammoth mosaic creation on the west side of the school’s towering library that portrays Christ with arms extended skyward).

As Grantland Rice wrote 80 years ago in describing Notre Dame’s eternally famous Four Horsemen backfield, “outlined against gray October sky,” (November in my case) I got to experience the Notre Dame football I had been aware of virtually my entire life.

As longtime TV football announcer Chris Shenkel used to open broadcasts during the 1970s, “College football! What better way to spend an autumn afternoon?”

That’s definitely the feeling you get at South Bend. There is pride and pageantry everywhere. There’s pre-game tail-gating like I’ve never seen. The Irish faithful are cocky for the most part, but also very genuine, and they treat their visitors well.

The Goodyear Blimp hovers constantly overhead while providing aerial coverage for NBC. The U.S. Air Force fly-over just prior to kickoff is breath-taking.

I remember as a child watching the movie “Knute Rockne: All American.” The movie is about the legendary Notre Dame coach who in the 1920s brought the school’s football program to a stature never before seen on any college campus.

With Pat O’Brien playing the title role in the movie that was released in 1940, the early charm and charisma of the Fighting Irish is well documented despite some of the extra Hollywood “overplay” of the era.

The movie also brings out the legend and tragedy of star player George Gipp (portrayed by Ronald Reagan). Gipp, Notre Dame’s first All-American, died in 1920 from complications of strep throat just days after leading the Irish to a landmark victory over Northwestern.

The movie ends with the tragedy of Rockne’s own untimely death in a 1931 plane crash.

Subsequently, I have always been a big observer of the Notre Dame mystique. That isn’t to say that I’ve ever been a big Irish fan because often I have been far from it. I’m just one who has respectfully admired what has been there for so long.

I feel also that playing on the Notre Dame field before 80,000-plus people had a lot to do with the UNC Tar Heels turning in probably their best effort of the year in a 45-26 loss to the 11th-ranked Irish Saturday. For a team that was losing for the eighth time in nine games under a lame-duck coaching staff, the Tar Heels made a surprisingly good showing on the Notre Dame turf.

Prior to Saturday, the last time North Carolina had played Notre Dame was on Oct. 11, 1975 at Chapel Hill. I went up that day to take an auburn-haired UNC senior nursing student to the game and we watched a sophomore quarterback named Joe Montana come off the bench to rally the Irish from a 14-0 halftime deficit to a 21-14 victory.

That evening, I got up the nerve to ask the senior nursing student to marry me.