I tried to get this published elsewhere, but failed. I still like it. I’m sharing it here.

It started, perhaps, as an in-joke. Maybe a brother-in-law joke. Or a t-shirt, one of those hastily designed gaudy numbers you see at fan shops. Maybe the whole thing began as a bit on talk radio. Sometimes the organic nature of jokes, or even traditions, can be lost to us without a very serious investigation.

This is not that.

I remember it all those ways. A guy said it on the air, off the cuff, from the hip, and wherever else one-liners fall from. I saw it on a shirt. And, if you’re there long enough, you live it, unfortunately.

You don’t book weddings on fall Saturdays in the South.

I have been to several Saturday weddings in the fall in the Deep South, an exercise designed to weigh your love of sport and the ol’ alma mater against these two people standing up there. Who are those people, anyway? Strangers, probably. I mean, do you know the bride’s third quarter rushing stats? Have you memorized the tackle for loss numbers the groom has put up this season? What even is the win-loss record of the person performing this ceremony, anyway? Alternatively, it could be a deliberate measure to keep attendance low.

I mention this because, of course, weddings are organized far in advance, but not farther out than the more-than-a-century long tradition of watching dudes hit each other as hard as they can for temporary victory and immortal glory. Long is the memory, short is the ceremony. The same is true for any given football play, but one of these two events lasts longer in the memory of most of us.

Authurine Babineaux and Merrick Bourgeois — two people we don’t know at all, but who prove my point nicely — were married on Saturday, October 31st in 1959 in Cankton, Louisiana, right there at St. John Berchman Catholic Church. The writeup in the paper, as was the custom, describes the bride’s dress and what her attendant was wearing. There’s a photo with the notice, the image has gone fuzzy with digitization, but the new Authurine Bourgeois looks beautiful. The groom is wearing a white jacket. They had a little reception in the cafeteria of the school they both attended. Maybe they met there. Maybe they hit it off there. We don’t know. We do know there was a four-layer cake. We don’t know when the celebration ended, or if they were able to catch Billy Cannon’s immediately legendary punt return.

There are more than 2,000 returns for “married Oct 31” in the 1959 Louisiana newspapers. And some of, most of, or, perish the thought, all of those people who attended missed Billy Cannon’s Halloween Run at Death Valley. But which did they talk about more, as the years passed?

My first fall wedding on a Saturday in the South was in 1993. It was November 20th. It was 11th ranked Alabama at number 6 Auburn. It was the Iron Bowl.

It was a wedding in someone’s home. And they chose to do this event during the football game.

Perhaps there was some other event scheduled in the living room in the next hour.

Oh, the service was lovely, marred only by my running up and down the hall, getting scoring updates from the radio from the bedroom where the groom had previously been getting ready. “Does anyone have a reason these too should not be wed? And what is the score, young man?” Even then, as a young football fan, I wanted to share the news, and that news was the game and newly emerged folk heroes.

Auburn won that game 22-14. The Tigers were on probation that year: no bowls and no TV. Some entrepreneurial outfit sold Radio National Championship bumper stickers. They were everywhere for a time.

That house, where the wedding was, was full of people. I wonder which event is more memorable all these years later.

In October of 2012, my wife and I (who were married in the summer, thank you very much) attended a wedding that was scheduled on the Third Saturday in October. In the South, you capitalize it just like that. The Third Saturday in October. This is the Alabama-Tennessee game, a joyous collision that seriously impacts commerce in two states. Alabama being atop the polls and facing a heated rival probably hampered the wedding’s turnout. There were some other big games with implications that day third-ranked Florida was taking on ninth-ranked South Carolina, number six LSU had Texas A&M, ranked as the 20th best team in the land.

Why, I asked the bride, beforehand, did you choose this time of year? This date? She attended a huge football school. As did her brother and her mother and her father before her. As did everyone up and down her family tree. As did her husband.

She offered that the weather is too unpredictable in the spring. (It is not.) And that there would be TVs at the reception. (There were not.) It was a fine wedding. I remember there was a bar at the reception – but no TVs with games. On the bar were little chalkboards which told you the preferred drinks of the bride and groom, so you could order the same and be just like them. I don’t remember her choice, but the groom’s drink was rum and Coke.

You don’t have to ask yourself where he was on the idea of a Saturday wedding in the fall.

A few years later, in 2016, we attended a wedding in Tennessee. One of those where the bride and groom had reserved a beautiful chapel and everyone looked terrific, and every single person was in a festive mood. It was a mild October day. I was just getting over a cold and had a terrible coughing fit during the middle of the service. I left so as not to interrupt the beautiful ceremony.

I regained my composure but couldn’t get back to my seat without causing another scene, so I eased up the side of the chapel, and stood along the wall behind these guys.

He was anxious about the event; the game I mean. That installment of the Tennessee-Georgia series turned out to have one of the wildest finishes in the history of the sport. Those border rivalries are always tense, taut, and played close to the rented tuxedo vest.

The young couple got married and we gathered outside for the ceremonial send off. The bride and groom ran through the gathered loved ones and into the waiting car. That’s when the bomb was thrown, and the subsequent Hail Mary.

And that’s when this grown man, the guy above, a pillar of his community, a member of the local education board who was eager to see off a loved one started doing chest slides in the lawn in front of the chapel. The bride was beautiful. The bride was upstaged.

This isn’t about me, but that would become one of my bigger moments on social media. All the right people and outlets amplified the post and eventually it got back to the guy above, a person I did not know. I thought he might be angry that I’d outted him in profile. He thought it was hilarious. I assume that’s because his team won.

And that’s one of the risks you take with a wedding during football season. What happens if the wrong team wins. Now who has a sour taste in their mouth about your wedding day? Your guests? Your partner? Your parents? You?

“But, dear writer,” you may say, “this is not my concern. I am not in the South. I will not be wed in the South. I live here, in the world wide web.”

Fair enough, bride-elect or bridegroom-elect, but consider, that sport is part of culture. We, being social creatures, export the best parts of our culture. This, of course, is made that much easier – and each game made that much more important – because of the dazzling array of streaming and cable packages available to us today. These, then, are cautionary tales for the entire country, certainly a lesson less and less limited to the South.

Put another way, UConn and UMass have been at it since the 19th century, that series is tied, and they have two contests coming up in the next few years. Don’t ask a Huskie or the Minutemen to choose.

If you’ve got love and joyous union on the mind and there are leaves and footballs in the air, consider your audience, and consider the spring or the summer. Green leaves also make for a beautiful photographic backdrop. Baseballs are flying around.

Your guests will likely be paying much more attention to you than a routine pop up to right.