I wrongly assumed that the play, The Irish . . .  And How They Got That Way, was about the University of Notre Dame not getting picked for the recent 12-team college football playoff and announcing thereafter that it would reject any other bowl bids that might be made, which, to me, seemed antithetical to their nickname, the Fighting Irish, which was approved by the university’s president in 1927 as being “preferable to the school’s more derisive nicknames,” and with the “hope that we may always be worthy of the ideal embodied in the term.”

So, no football, but a lot of drinking, as if at a football game, unaccompanied, however, by the Irish bar classic Whiskey in the Jar. 

There were 34 other songs in whole or part, but not the Notre Dame Victory March (acknowledging, I suppose, that you can’t win if you don’t play), which Sports Illustrated, in 2019, ranked as the fourth best college fight song.

The players (I mean the cast, not the members of the football team), all of whom I have seen before, were up to their usual high standards, but I would have liked to hear more from violinist Elleon Dobias, who was a standout.