As the University of Toledo and Bowling Green State University meet on Saturday for the 83rd time on the football field with the series tied 39-39-4, it’s hard to imagine a football season without the tradition and pageantry of the Battle of I-75.

The game has a rich history and often results in bragging rights in Northwest Ohio.

But for a 13-year stretch following the 1935 matchup, the rivals took the game off the schedule and didn’t resume the rivalry until 1948.

In a game played at Swayne Field, home of the Toledo Mud Hens, on Friday, Nov. 1, 1935 — moved up a day because of the interest in Ohio State’s home game vs. Notre Dame the next day — the Rockets, in the last season of head coach Jim Nicholson, cruised to a 63-0 win over Bowling Green.

The win was Toledo’s third in a row against Bowling Green, with the combined scores showing a 111-7 advantage for Toledo. Days after the game, reports came out that the teams would take a break from the annual matchup.

“Frankly, Toledo is too tough for us in football,” then-Bowling Green athletic director Warren Steller said in a Blade article. “We feel that we can no longer compete on even terms.”

A Blade story from Nov. 5, 1935, also references a dispute over Toledo choosing to withdraw from the Ohio Conference as another reason BG chose not to schedule its northern neighbor.

But legend has grown that the 1935 game ended in a fight between the teams, with fans getting involved as well. While archived issues of The Blade do not reveal any insight into a brawl, a 1935 article in the Campus Collegian, the UT student newspaper, alludes to some kind of altercation.

“With more trouble avoiding flying fists than avoiding blockers and tacklers, the University of Toledo football team met and defeated the Bowling Green Falcons 63-0 at Swayne Field,” the game story in the Collegian read.

A Blade article from Oct. 3, 1948 also hinted at some bad blood after the 1935 game, saying, “The game was followed by a series of charges and countercharges reflecting on another’s sportsmanship. All arguments and activities stopped with an announcement by Dr. H.B. Williams, Falcons president, that athletic relations between the schools had come to an end.”

The break in scheduling was not limited to football as the two schools severed athletic relations completely.

Finally, what that Oct. 3, 1948 Blade article referred to as BG’s “athletic resurrection” meant the Falcons could not be ignored. The schools first resumed the rivalry on the basketball court prior to returning to the football field.

“When the rivalry between the two northwestern Ohio powers was first resumed on the basketball court last winter there was some fear that amicable relations were not possible,” a 1948 article in the Bee Gee News, the Bowling Green student newspaper, read. “This was emphatically disproven in the Toledo Field House and now there is little worry about the conduct of the student spectators. Everyone is more concerned with the prospective merits of the football teams. This is as it should be.”

When the rivalry resumed on the gridiron in 1948, it was Toledo who seemed in disarray. The team was riding a two-game losing streak while back Dick Ehrhardt and guard Dick Dicken quit the team the week of the game vs. BG in a dispute with coach J. Neil Stahley, who nonetheless seemed confident.

“If Bowling Green State University smells the blood of a wounded team and expects to come in for the kill Saturday, it is as mistaken as Russia’s foreign policy,” Stahley told The Blade.

Despite his bravado, Bowling Green used six interceptions and two touchdowns by Vern Dunham to earn a 21-6 win at the Glass Bowl.

More importantly, the game was back in good graces. Over the next four seasons, the competitive balance in the series did not miss a beat, as the teams alternated wins and losses.

The 2018 game marks 70 straight years of competition between the teams since the rivalry resumed in 1948. It’s hard to imagine another time when this game would be absent from the schedule.

Contact Brian Buckey at bbuckey@theblade.com, 419-724-6110, or on Twitter @BrianBuckey.

First Published October 5, 2018, 5:22 p.m.