O-hi-o

 I love it when coaches lose their ... stuff.

Who can forget Mike Gundy's epic "I'm a man! I'm 40!" rant lo these many years before? Or the all-time champion, Cubs manager Lee Elia's classic "My (bleeping) ass" meltdown, now 40 years old?

There's always something perversely comic when Coach turns into Mt. Vesuvius in public. If you're a witness, the only thing that's scary about it is that you'll burst out laughing before he leaves the room rather then after.

And so to last night, in the wake of that epic rock fight between Ohio State and Notre Dame -- a classic example of old-school slobberknocking that Ohio State won 17-14 on a just-this-side-of-walkoff 1-yard run with a second to play. There may have been a football game in Notre Dame Stadium as good since the USC-Notre Dame Bush Push game 18 years ago, but right now I can't think of any.

At any rate, here came Ohio State coach Ryan Day in the immediate aftermath, channeling his inner Mike Gundy.

First he hollered about something dotty old Lou Holtz said, but didn't enlighten us as to what it was. (Apparently Lou said Notre Dame would win because Ohio State wasn't physical enough in big games). Then he ranted about how tough his team actually was, and finished with some weird s*** about Ohio.

"IT'S ALWAYS BEEN OHIO AGAINST THE WORLD!" he screamed.

Wait ... what?

I'm as big a history dork as they come, but I can't remember a time when Ohio took on the other 49 states all by itself. Or the time brave Ohioans held off hoards of invading Canadians at the Alamo Truckstop on I-90. Or that other time when the country banded together to keep Ohioans Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, William Howard Taft and Warren G. Harding out of the White House.

Ohio against the world? Does Woody Hayes tearing up a sideline marker count?

Ohio against itself, maybe. Or Ryan Day against himself.

If you watched you know he did his damnedest to lose to the Notre Dames but was rescued by the sheer grit of his players. They were the ones, after all, who overcame both the Fighting Irish and their coach's occasional knack for being a blockhead.

Start with his decision to go for it on fourth-and-1 at the goal line when he should have taken the gimme field goal in a 0-0 game in which points were clearly going to come dear. Then there were a couple of other fourth-and-1 fails, one of them a bizarre decision with four minutes to play to run wideout Emeka Egbuka on a jet sweep with the Buckeyes half-a-step away from a first down inside the 20.

Ah, but then the Buckeyes got the ball back, first-year starting quarterback Kyle McCord -- growing up right before our eyes -- made two huge throws to convert a fourth down and a third-and-19, and Chip Trayanum bull-rushed his way in off the left side for the W.

To his credit, that play call by Day caught the Irish D leaning the other way.

To be fair, he got a little help from his counterpart, Marcus Freeman, whose team played impeccable defensive football until the very end, when Freeman failed to get an 11th man onto the field for the last two plays and decided not to try.

"We were trying to get a fourth defensive lineman in the game," Freeman said later. "I told him, 'Just stay off, we can't afford a penalty.'"

Ay-yi-yi. Really, Coach?

I guess that means this game will always have a nickname, too, just like the Bush Push.

Call it the Addition Omission game. And, of course, the Day Trippin' game.