Rick Mirer remembers the first time he slapped the "Play Like A Champion Today" sign at Notre Dame.
The wooden sign -- 3 feet high, 4 feet wide and painted gold with blue hand lettering -- hangs over the narrow staircase in the tunnel at Notre Dame Stadium, just high enough where players can reach up to pay homage on their way to the field.
"As a student, I'm touching the sign, and I didn't know it hadn't been there 50 years," said the former star quarterback, who arrived at Notre Dame in 1989. "That locker room was sacred, that stairwell was sacred, that tunnel was sacred, and the sign's a very big part of that.