Blast from the past

 Grantland Rice won't be there today when Illinois and Michigan suit up for the 100th anniversary of what some people (OK, me) call the Red Grange Game. Granny went off to join the angels some time back, so the pressbox poets will be on their own in conjuring the appropriate purplish prose.

Red, of course, will not be there either. The Galloping Ghost/Wheaton Iceman joined the angels himself  33 years ago -- or 67 years after he destroyed Michigan virtually by himself on that October afternoon in 1924.

Scored five touchdowns that day, Red did. Threw a 20-yard pass for another score. Took the opening kickoff 95 yards to the house, then scored three more times in the first 12 minutes on excursions of 67, 56 and 44 yards. In the second half, he slalomed through the Michigans for another score.

Oh, yeah. He also intercepted two passes on defense.

In the century since the Illini haven't seen a day like it, and Granny Rice immortalized it with a few typically embroidered lines that began with "A streak of fire, a breath of flame." It wasn't quite "Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again," but it would do.

Irascible Michigan coach Fielding Yost and his Wolverines, of course, likely would have described the proceedings a bit more pungently. Now, 100 years almost to the day (in 1924 they played on Oct. 18; this is Oct. 19) Yost's lineal descendants and Red Grange's meet again in Champaign.

Both teams are ranked, though not highly. I'm going with the Illini only because history would seem to demand such symmetry, and also because Illinois is summoning every ghost it can by dressing out their players in throwback 1924 unis.

No one, of course, will be wearing Red's fabled No. 77. That's because Illinois retired it as soon as he played his last game in 1925. It remains one of only two retired numbers in school history, the other the No. 50 worn by Dick Butkus.

Instead, the lion's share of the running game likely will be carried by  Josh McCray, a 6-1, 235-pound junior from Enterprise, Ala., who lugged it 16 times for 78 yards last week against Purdue. McCray got the work because leading rusher Kaden Feagin was sidelined, as he will be again today.

McCray, by the way, wears No. 6. It ain't 77, but for one blast-from-the-past afternoon the Illini faithful might pretend it is.

It's not like Michigan will mind. After all, Ol' Red's long gone, right?

Um, right?