It was a perfect Saturday afternoon in South Bend nearly three decades ago today as the 1995 college football season got underway for the No. 9 Notre Dame Fighting Irish.
Notre Dame had high aspirations for year as they were looking for a bounce-back after a disappointing 1994 campaign that saw the Irish duck to just 6-5-1.
Related: Notre Dame’s all-time results vs. each Big Ten team
The opener was supposed to be a cakewalk against a Northwestern squad that hadn’t won more than three games the last eight seasons and hadn’t been to a bowl game in 46 years.
On top of that, Notre Dame had beaten Northwestern by a combined score of 111-34 the previous three seasons. It wasn’t supposed to even be a game, but what proceeded to happen was one of the great upsets in college football history and led to one of the all-time underdog seasons the sport has ever seen.
Gary Barnett, Pat Fitzgerald, Darnell Autry, and the rest of the Northwestern Wildcats upset Notre Dame 17-15 before an embarking on an incredibly unlikely unbeaten season in the Big Ten and earning just their second trip to the Rose Bowl in program history.
That Notre Dame team would lose just once more that regular season and record lopsided victories over blue-bloods Texas and USC, but the majority of Irish fans think of just one game when they look back at 1995.
The opener against Northwestern.
Here are photos from that all-time afternoon that came at the unfortunate expense of [autotag]Lou Holtz[/autotag] and Notre Dame: