Boston College's Red Bandanna Uniforms Return, This Time on September 11 Itself

Boston College will wear its Red Bandanna uniforms Friday night against Rutgers, and the calendar has given the tribute a weight it does not usually carry: kickoff at 7:30 PM ET falls on September 11, twenty five years to the day.

Every year this is the best looking thing in college football, and every year the reason for it is heavier than the fabric. Welles Remy Crowther played lacrosse at Boston College, class of 1999, No. 19. On the morning of September 11, 2001 he was working as an equities trader at Sandler O'Neill, on the 104th floor of the South Tower. He was 24. He put on the red bandanna his father had given him as a boy, found people in the smoke at the 78th floor sky lobby, carried a woman down, pointed the rest toward the stairs, and then went back up. Again. He is credited with saving at least a dozen people who did not know his name until survivors later described a young man in a red bandanna. His remains were recovered the following March, in the lobby, alongside FDNY firefighters. He had wanted to be one of them.

The football program has carried the bandanna motif since 2014, and the ritual around it has become the point as much as the jersey. The story gets told to a roster that was mostly born after the towers fell. Freshmen hear it for the first time from people who have told it a hundred times and still cannot get through it clean. I don't have the design breakdown for this year's set in front of me, but honestly, the details of the striping are the least interesting thing about it.

The visitor matters too. Rutgers builds its roster out of New Jersey and the New York metro, the ground that took the hardest hit, and plenty of those families have their own version of that morning. This is not a road team walking into someone else's ceremony. It is two programs from the same wounded corner of the country.

checked the almanac: college football did not play the weekend after the attacks. the sport stopped, stood still, and came back a week later. twenty five years on, one school stands still on purpose, in uniform, for four hours a year.

What comes next is simple and it repeats: the Crowther family in the stands, the number 19 showing up in places you don't expect, and another class of 19 and 20 year olds learning what a person can decide to do with eighteen minutes.