Late at night this week, soft blue and gold light bathes the columns that front Wheeler Hall, giving it the look of a gala event that emptied out long ago. It stands flanked by the Campanile, which is similarly lit as though both are protecting the silent, subtle flame of tradition.

Few linger in the chilly night air to ponder why the columns are lit blue and gold.

During the day, the lights are off. People flood Sproul Plaza with signs and angry chants. They call for the saving of public education, without which many of us would not be here. They wear armbands to show their solidarity. The armbands are bright red.

Maybe this is what Bud "Dog" Turner means when he tries to explain, ruefully, why the spirit of the Big Game just doesn't seem as strong as it used to be. He shrugs and says:

"There's too many other things going on nowadays."

Nowadays, "Dog" oversees field security at Memorial Stadium. This is his 39th year working in the Cal football program. His ties go back a lot further than that.

The first game Turner remembers seeing was in 1947. Cal hosted Navy. He worked as an usher on game days when he was in high school. In Lafayette, when Turner was growing up, there were two restaurants, and one of them -- "Bill's Place" -- was where all the "sports nuts" hung out. When Big Game week came around, he remembers, the nuts' musical taste narrowed considerably.

"The only song on the jukebox was the Cal fight song," says Turner. "I think it was 25 records on the jukebox, and you better not play anything else. And everybody wore blue or gold or red."

In 1956, Turner was in the 101st Airborne Division and stationed at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. Early one Saturday morning, he caught a military hop to California to be there for the 59th Big Game. When it ended, he got a ride to an Air Force base in Marin County and flew back.

"Didn't even let my folks know I was here," he says.

"Dog" guesses that he's seen over 50 Big Games in person. He's been on the field for at least 45 of them. He started working for Cal in 1970, helping with field phones for the PA announcer. When the Bears pulled off The Play in 1982, he watched it unfold from inside the north tunnel.

While that whole five-lateral thing was cool, though, it wasn't the greatest finish that he's seen. That came 10 years earlier, when Cal trailed Stanford by three points with three seconds left and decided to run a play from the Cardinal's 10-yard line rather than kick a field goal for the tie.

"Dog" was on the sidelines, working with equipment at the time. Before coach Mike White made the decision to go for the win, Turner had already grabbed the place kicker's tee and thrown it into the stands.

"I had another one in my pocket," he says. "In case somebody screamed."

Nobody did. Quarterback Vince Ferragamo threw a touchdown to Steve Sweeney as time expired and the Bears won, 24-21.

"(Sweeney) got up and the mud was falling off him, and the crowd ..." Turner pauses. "It was unbelievable."

People nowadays talk about these games as part of the history and tradition of the rivalry. "Dog" lived them. Listening to him, you start to understand how much things have changed, and how such an amount of red on campus might have been unthinkable once, and why -- 61 years after seeing his first one -- Turner appreciates the Big Game more than ever.

"It means everything to me," he says.

When Tedford took over the program in 2002, he started the practice of bringing everyone together before the Big Game and talking about its history, emphasizing a different part of the story each time.

"He wanted the kids to understand the significance of it, know the importance of it," says running backs coach Ron Gould, the lone coach who stayed over from the previous staff.

Players, many of whom knew nothing about the rivalry before joining the program, learned the history when they arrived and picked up the details as they went, in a variety of different ways.

Seniors Brian Holley and Mike Tepper, both grew up with the USC-UCLA rivalry. Tepper researched the history of the Axe himself when he came in as a freshman. Holley heard the full story of the rivalry from his older brother, who read it to him off of the EA Sports NCAA Football video game.

Senior linebacker Eddie Young, a Berkeley native, made up his knowledge of the history of the game through hearing the story in bits and pieces from his coaches and teammates.

"I remember hearing something about how (the Axe) used to be like this four-foot-long thing, they cut it in a butcher shop and transported it on a ferry," says Young. "Crazy stories."

And all of them have seen the picture that hangs around the locker room during Big Game week -- the first photograph of the Axe -- and read the accompanying article.

In these ways, they grew familiar with the game's historical importance.

But none really understood it until 2007, when a Tedford-coached team lost the Axe for the first time. That's when they found out what it means to people-not just to themselves or the seniors who went out on a sour note, but to the community that hadn't gone a year without it since 2002.

"I realized how big it was when I lost it in '07," says Tepper. "Losing the Axe in '07 was the worst feeling I've ever had in my life. It tears you apart."

"You kind of take it for granted," says Holley. "We had the Axe a couple years, (and thought) OK, it's a random game. But when we didn't have the Axe, it revived it for me."

It also gave reclaiming the Axe in 2008 a dimension that no player on that team had known.

As "Dog" Turner says, when you lose, "It's a horrible feeling."

"But when you win it back, it's huge."

Gould knows. The running backs coach was hired at Cal during the Cardinal's seven-game winning streak from 1995 to 2001. He endured five losses before winning the Axe in 2002.

"I've been on both sides," he says. "I have much more appreciation for the Axe having gone a few years without it."

And he attests to how the game affects people over time. It's the same reason why "Dog" Turner and this year's seniors all agree that the rivalry has become more important to them each year that they've been a part of it.

"My career is coming to a close, and I have a greater appreciation for it," says Holley. "You don't have too many things in life that you come across that are 100 years old."

"It wasn't that huge back (when I was a freshman)," says Young. "It seems like it's a lot bigger now.

"Seeing that real old picture hanging in the locker room and thinking that's the same Axe, that's crazy."

Mark Brazinski is a true freshman from New Jersey who likes to learn. So when Tepper and the elder offensive linemen gave him one of their "periodical research assignments" earlier this week -- to write a six-to-eight page paper on the history of the Big Game -- he didn't find it too difficult.

"There's a lot of information," he says, as rain starts to fall over Memorial Stadium on Tuesday evening. "What was interesting was how it all started."

He briefly recounts the baseball game where the Axe first appeared, the subsequent chase through San Francisco and some friendly pranks that have been played throughout the years -- like the 21 Stanford students who allegedly set off a tear gas bomb while stealing the Axe back in 1930.

"If you did any of that now, you'd be arrested and be charged with disturbing the peace or something," he says.

Your mind drifts back down to the softly lit Wheeler Hall, and the red armbands on campus. Times have changed.

And yet, the game seems to have no less influence over Brazinski than it does over Turner.

"When you have so much history and the tradition doesn't change, it's still going strong, I can't fathom how that happens," he says. "It's unbelievable."

To illustrate how important the game is, he brings up Tepper's quote about how hard it was to lose the Axe.

"Even for players that weren't even playing," says Brazinski. "It ruins your weekend, everything ..."

He pauses for a moment, a true freshman trying to explain how much that loss affected Tepper, who was a redshirt junior at the time.

There's no rush. Brazinski will get his opportunity over the next four years. He'll learn what the now-seniors have learned over their time at Cal.

He'll someday look back over how the rivalry has ebbed and flowed during his lifetime like Bud "Dog" Turner does today, when a five-year collegiate career will be like a drop in a bucket.

A little ways down the hill from the stadium, blue and gold bulbs illuminate Wheeler Hall and the Campanile, stone symbols of longevity. Somewhere on campus, closely guarded this week, is the Stanford Axe -- the same one that was stolen and smuggled across the bay to Berkeley, 110 years ago.

All of that is in the past, while all of Brazinski's experience lies in the next four seasons and beyond. So for now, he stops trying to explain Tepper and the effect that the Big Game seems to have on people, and is content with this:

"I guess it's something that you won't really understand until you're part of it yourself."

Tags: BIG GAME, CAL, CALIFORNIA GOLDEN BEARS, CAL FOOTBALL, STANFORD