If I had to venture a guess, I’d say that my neighbor, Billy, is in his late seventies. He’s one of the gentlest people I’ve ever met. At least once a week I look out my side window and see him at my fence, watching my chickens. “I just love how calming they are,” he tells me. “I love to listen to ‘em babble.” Billy is a quiet man. He speaks so softly that you almost have to lean in to hear what he says. Except on Saturdays, when Alabama is playing. On Saturdays, when Alabama is playing, his voice will carry across the street and through the walls of my house, into my living room. They’ve been yelling a bit more in the post-Saban era. 

Conversely, one of my closest friends, Cooper, is a dyed in the wool Auburn fan. He’s not much for yelling, but his silence over the course of our friendship says plenty. On Saturdays I can expect a simple text from him: War Damn. Lately he has spared me the details of his misery; anymore he is completely unsurprised by what calamity is raining down in Auburn, Alabama. It’s all he can do to laugh, lest he cry.

As you likely know, the Iron Bowl is on Saturday. It will mark the 90th time that Alabama and Auburn have met. There’s no need to rehash the details, but let’s: Alabama has won five straight, eight of the last ten, and 13 of the last 20. The Tide leads the series 51-37-1, and starting in 2007–when a much maligned football coach jumped ship from the NFL ranks and took over a downtrodden program in Tuscaloosa—it’s been more crimson and white than burnt orange and navy. 

And yet.

Once per season, every season, it all goes out the window: history, recency, rosters, awards; wins and losses and conference standings and whether or not Kalen DeBoer is the real deal or who, exactly, D.J. Durkin is keeping the seat warm for. Once per season we set ourselves up for a little bit of magic. 4th and 31 with :24 seconds left to play. A missed field goal-turned earth-shattering, possibly-the-greatest-play-in-the-history-of-college-football 109-yard return as the clock hits all zeroes and even ol’ Malzahn himself was too stunned to do much but wear a slack-jawed grin as he shook Saban’s hand. We ready ourselves for these types of moments, and the Iron Bowl seems to deliver them to us, and steadily. This is the beauty not just in college football, but in a deep-seated rivalry that conjures something more than what can be measured in rankings or recruiting classes.

After stumbling out of the gate in Tallahassee and losing at home to Oklahoma just a week ago, Alabama can’t afford another misstep. They dropped to 10th in the country, and a third loss would all but remove them from the playoff picture. But as steady–dare I say great–as Ty Simpson has been, the Tide’s run game has been missing all season, and calling Ryan Williams’s sophomore campaign a disappointment would be like calling Bo Jackson a pretty decent running back. The Tide’s weaknesses were on full display last week, and no doubt that Auburn was watching. And those Tigers—four wins and six losses, an interim head coach, and a roster surely to undergo major change this offseason—a win against Big Brother won’t save their season in a technical sense, but it might save their season in some otherwise meaningful, lasting manner.

This is the south, folks: we believe in sports, and miracles, and that fuzzy space where they occasionally seem to intersect. Billy, across the street? Ask him about Milroe to Bond, back corner of the end zone. Better yet, ask him about 1985 and the leg of Van Tiffin. And Cooper? Ask him about Nick Marshall or Chris Davis or the absolute spectacle that was Cam Newton. Ask your friends, your neighbors, your grocery store clerk: they’ll all have something. They’ll all carry some kind of hope into this weekend. The question isn’t whether we’ll witness something like a miracle on Saturday in Auburn. The question is, where will we find it? 

Ask, and Saturday, watch.