In this Daily file photo, David Baker attempts to intercept a pass during Notre Dame’s 7-0 defeat of OU. The photo’s caption in the Tuesday, Nov. 19 edition of The Daily read, “COME HERE — Jumping high in the air for an Irish pass is safety man David Baker, OU’s alternate unit quarterback. He wasn’t able to hang on to this one, however, in the second period he leaped for a similar pass and intercepted a Frank Reynolds toss in the endzone.”

The Texas Tech Red Raiders will march across the border and invade Norman-Town this Saturday, Nov. 22, 2008.

This once little-known team from the plains of West Texas is led by a mad scientist named Mike Leach who has rallied his troops to a 9-0 record and the No. 2 ranking in the country.

In seeking to defeat the legendary Sooners of Oklahoma, he will do battle against his former boss, Bob Stoops.

It will be Grant v. Lee, Patton v. Rommel in a struggle played out before a national television audience.

The prize will not be the western world, but close to it, with the victor on the inside track in the Big 12 South, the nation’s best football division.

OU has been installed as a seven-point favorite, but this battle will be even-steven, toe-to-toe, no quarter asked nor given. With a rider in a black mask on a black horse and a mascot of two Okies in a wagon hitched behind two ponies, it will a struggle between the new and the old for collegiate football supremacy.

With a historic game set to be played at Owen Field on Saturday, it seems only right to recall the epic battle fought there 51 years and one week ago, on Nov. 16, 1957, when OU’s 47-game winning streak ended against the Irish of Notre Dame in a 7-0 war of the worlds.

Every Notre Dame and OU fan remembers where they were that day.

The 47-game winning streak began in 1953. In the first game of 1953, OU lost to Notre Dame, so it was losses to Notre Dame that bookended OU’s record-setting streak.

In the second game of 1953, OU tied Pitt but won out for the rest of the 1953 season.

The Sooners went undefeated in 1954, 1955 and 1956. Many consider the 1956 team OU’s best during the streak (it beat Notre Dame 40-0 in South Bend that year) but it didn’t go to a bowl game in 1954 or 1956.

At the time, the NCAA had a tricky rule that a team could not go to two consecutive bowl games, so OU sat out, denied postseason glory those two years.

In 1957, OU was the pre-season AP pick to win the National Championship, even though it had only three returning starters. Notre Dame won its first four games, but the Irish lost its next two before the battle in Norman.

Las Vegas had OU as a 17-point favorite, but this was before anyone knew that an epic war was about to be fought in the Sooner Nation.

The weather was Oklahoma gray for the game, perhaps a bad omen for OU. The wind did not affect passing that day, because passing was not on the mind of either team. It was a ground war, not unlike that seen in France and Belgium during World War I.

The game was broadcast on national TV, but most Oklahomans remember listening to it on the radio, because many OU fans did not own a TV at the time.

It was clearly the most important collegiate regular-season football game since Knute Rockne’s “Four Horsemen” (war, pestilence, death and destruction), defeated Army on Oct. 18, 1924, in the Polo Grounds in New York.

It was the most legendary game played at Owen Field, until possibly 1971, when the Cornhuskers of Nebraska escaped with a victory in Norman on Thanksgiving Day.

OU dominated the first half of the epic struggle against Notre Dame. It had three chances to score but failed on each occasion.

The Irish were apparently roused by a half-time speech because they mercilessly ground out yardage in the second half. Notre Dame out-rushed OU by more than 100 yards on the game.

Each foot of turf was contested. Owen Field had no synthetic grass then, so in the November cold, the game was played on brown grass on the edge of the Dust Bowl.

It was led by a giant fullback named Nick Pietrosane. He was the soul of the Irish offense. He relentlessly ground out yardage on Notre Dame’s final drive of 20 plays and 80 yards.

Pietrasone’s greatest contribution in that series was not made while carrying the ball.

OU was fooled on Notre Dame’s final play.

It was fourth and three.

Everyone figured Pietrosone would go up the middle; after all, he only needed three yards until he hit the end zone, and gaining nine feet on the final drive was like taking candy from a baby for him.

Give the Irish credit; they never considered a field goal. Perhaps it was the times, perhaps it was the gusting wind, perhaps it was self-confidence, but the Irish wanted to win this game on the ground, not in the air.

Pietrasone — blocking, not carrying — led a then-little-known (he is now immortal in the annals of Notre Dame and OU football) half-back named Dick Lynch around the right corner, knocked the OU defensive end out of the play and Lynch scored.

7 — 0, Irish.

OU still had more than three minutes to score. The Sooners drove the ball to the Irish’s 24, where they turned the ball over.

The Sooners’ streak ended in deathly silence.

Wilkinson closed the locker room to the press and told his team that its 47-game win streak would never be duplicated.

Fifty-one years later, Wilkinson’s post-game prediction is still correct.