Notre Dame beat Navy despite having the ball only 17 minutes the whole game

A classic rivalry game was fun again.

No. 8 Notre Dame beat Navy on Saturday in South Bend, 24-17.

The Irish pulled that off despite possessing the ball for 17:18 out of 60 minutes, a year after they lost to Navy while only getting six drives the whole game. This time, ND had nine, counting a brief set of kneel downs at the end of regulation.

The Midshipmen and Irish have one of the country’s coolest rivalries.

The Irish are 75-13-1 in the longest-running intersectional rivalry game in the sport:

The games started in 1927, when the Irish won 19-6 in Baltimore. But World War II gave the series staying power.

Notre Dame lost a lot of its students to the war effort. It was still an all-male school, and its enrollment declined, reportedly to fewer than 3,000.

The Navy picked South Bend as the site for a V-12 Navy College Training Program — basically the ROTC for Midshipmen — and sent a bunch of students and hundreds of thousands of dollars to the campus. Notre Dame needed that money.

“All I can say is without the Navy during the war, this institution would have gotten down to a few hundred students," former Notre Dame president Theodore Hesburgh said in 2004. “Instead of that, we were almost twice our normal size during the war, and we were able to contribute something to the Navy.”

During the Vietnam War, some colleges cracked down on or abolished their ROTC programs altogether. Notre Dame didn’t, which was a return of the favor to Navy.

The series has been a little more even, in terms of wins and losses, since Navy snapped a 43-year Notre Dame winning streak in 2007. Navy entered 3-6 in the last nine.

By the third quarter, it was clear that this would be fun.

The Midshipmen didn’t complete a pass until they connected on two in short succession in that quarter. The second was a 12-yard touchdown from Zach Abey to Craig Scott, who’d gotten wide-open between Irish defensive backs.

The Mids’ first completion was a 21-yarder to fullback Anthony Garglulo three plays before that, because downfield passes to fullbacks is an extremely Navy thing.

Notre Dame answered with a five-play, 78 yard TD drive right after that.

Navy missed a field goal just before the quarter expired, and the game went to the fourth tied despite Navy having possessed the ball for 34 of 45 minutes at that point.

Keivn Stepherson’s second touchdown catch of the game, in the fourth, stood up as the decisive score. The Irish stopped a halfback pass in their own territory to seal it later.

In the first half, the teams traded scores with symmetry.

Both got field goals from inside 40 yards before Navy quarterback Abey and Notre Dame QB Brandon Wimbush had TD runs of 1 and 2 yards, respectively. The Mids’ first touchdown came after a fumble gave them the ball at Notre Dame’s 39.

Notre Dame donned some excellent throwback uniforms.

Look at these beauties, designed to honor Knute Rockne: