Among all the hundreds of University of Alabama football games that have been played over more than a century, there are a relative few that have become touchstones, benchmarks that, with the passage of time, came to represent more than just one win, or an entire season. They become shorthand for an entire era, in the way that great battles come to define lengthy wars and, eventually, entire centuries.
Some games already belong entirely to the ages, surviving only in written accounts – the 1922 victory over Penn in Philadelphia that lifted the Crimson Tide program from a regional to a national profile is one example.