The famed Notre Dame Victory March goes back to 1908, when it was composed by brothers and university graduates John and Michael Shea. That era corresponds with the rise of the player piano. This method of listening to music eventually was replaced by phonograph recordings and then, radio. Before that happened, one piano roll after another was produced for player pianos, and it appears one of them allowed the piano to play the song that has become synonymous with the Fighting Irish:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cqrrgufSUw
Just listening to this makes you think of all of the locations this could have been performed in during that era, even on regular pianos. Imagine all of the saloons that heard this before Prohibition shut them down. Maybe on one stuffy afternoon, the piano player inside a nickelodeon decided to liven things up by having the audience listen to this tune. Whatever the case, the fact that it still plays on today shows the Shea brothers knew what they were doing in the early part of the last century.