Tennessee beats Alabama -- Celebratory cigars and a party 16 years in the making

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — The cigars were everywhere in Knoxville on Saturday morning.

Problem is, the University of Tennessee is a tobacco-free campus. It has been for decades. So, a not-small percentage of the hundreds of thousands of college football fans who poured into East Tennessee for the afternoon's matchup between No. 3 Alabama and No. 6 Tennessee had their stogies stuffed into secret locations. In their back pockets, behind secret zippers sewn into the lining of purses, even stuffed into Mission Impossible-like compartments of ballcaps.

It was a lot of trouble. But at the end of the most glorious football night seen by this town in a generation, you know what? It was no trouble at all.

Perhaps the single biggest indicator that the Third Saturday in October had finally returned to real relevance in the college football universe was that the cigars were being sneaked into Neyland Stadium by the pallet.

This series of football-obsessed border rivals has been happening since 1901. And since 1961, it has been easy to identify the victor in this winning streak-dominated series by the trails of white smoke that have risen from the locker room of one team or the other, like a college football Vatican announcing who will rein over this series for the next 364 days. A trail that rose into the sky after what very well might have been the greatest and almost inarguably the most entertaining of the 104 games played between them.

On Saturday evening in Knoxville, the scent of burning tobacco wafted its way from corners and tunnels and beneath the steel beams of the century-old stadium. It came from men who rode torn-down goalposts like mechanical bulls, and from countless sections of the parking decks around the stadium and the