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Pasadena, Calif. • After two memorable games over favored opponents — victories at Nebraska and at home over Boise State — to start its season, BYU is trying to embrace improbability for a third straight time on Saturday against 17-point favorite UCLA, and the Cougars couldn't have imagined a better spot to beat the odds.

Playing at the Rose Bowl, which BYU has done a number of times before, won't increase its chances in any way — it shrinks them, in fact — but the Cougars have the perfect venue, the most storied stretch of turf in college football, a hallowed stage for more drama this time around.

If you're gonna go big, this is a place to do it.

Doesn't mean it will happen. In truth, it'd probably be a bad bet. But the environs here in the Arroyo Seco, the green valley where the iconic bowl sits, where the ghosts of more than a hundred Rose Bowl games and a handful of Super Bowls gallop or fly around or hover or do whatever it is that football phantoms do, are ideal for making an attempt.

This is the place, after all, where Knute Rockne's Notre Dame team, featuring the Four Horsemen, played in the 1925 Rose Bowl game against Stanford, coached by Pop freakin' Warner. It's where Archie Griffin ran four straight years. It's where Jim Plunkett threw spirals. It's where Woody Hayes' Ohio State teams made their names. It's where Bo Schembechler lost the last game he ever coached. It's where Keith Jackson called his final game. It's where in 1929 Roy "Wrong Way" Riegels picked up a fumble and ran 65 yards — the wrong way, earning himself a nickname he never shook. It's where for so many seasons the champions of the Pac-8, Pac-10 or Pac-12 were matched against the champions from the Big Ten.

The Rose Bowl started before and has lasted longer than any other bowl game, having been played most years since 1902. Football became a part of the Tournament of Roses celebration, coexisting some years with jousting and tugs of war and ostrich, camel and elephant races. The current building, in one form or another — there have been at least five renovations — has been in place since 1922.

In 1942, the game was moved to Durham, N.C., on account of World War II and the threat of enemy sabotage or invasion or attack.

In 1961 and 1984, Caltech students pulled pranks, the first one during a game between Washington and Minnesota in which they secretly changed the directions for the card-stunt section of Washington fans, causing them to spell out "Caltech" and adding Beaver teeth — Caltech's mascot was the Beaver — on a huge image of a Husky. The second time, when UCLA played Illinois, the teams and numbers on the scoreboard were altered to read: Caltech 38, MIT 9.

Nobody bothers to pull any such shenanigans under a soft spotlight, nobody does that at the Zaxby's Heart of Dallas Bowl, or the Duck Commander Independence Bowl.

The Rose Bowl game is a college football titan. And the Rose Bowl is an historic football venue. It's … it's … it's Granddad's place.

I've got to admit, the bowl has special meaning to me for a number of personal reasons: 1) I lived 10 minutes from the stadium for the better part of a decade, getting a good view of it every day, 2) My wife, Lisa's, high school graduation ceremony took place in the bowl, 3) I used to regularly play both the Brookside Golf Courses, the tracks that double as parking lots for games played at the Rose Bowl, lobbing irons hit off the 17th tee at course No. 1 up and into the bowl, from right next to the sign that read: "Do not hit golf balls into the Rose Bowl," and 4) The stadium is the location of the last football game I ever watched in-person, on-site with my dad, who passed away 14 years ago.

For the record, the Rose Bowl has also hosted World Cup Finals, both men's and women's — it's where Brandi Chastain ripped her shirt off after the U.S. women won in 1999, Olympics events, the aforementioned Super Bowls, the Army-Navy game, rugby extravaganzas and entertainment ranging from mega-dances to concerts. It's one of the few fields where I, reflecting back when I was a kid on watching all those balmy, sun-splashed Rose Bowl games when the town where I lived back East was getting tortured by brutal January arctic blasts, actually reached down and touched the grass the first time I walked on it. Maybe you would, too.

What does any of that mean?

Nothing profound, really.

It's just a really warm, cool place.

BYU may not beat UCLA on Saturday night. But if the Cougars somehow pull it off, they couldn't have found a sweeter spot on the planet to do so.

GORDON MONSON hosts "The Big Show" with Spence Checketts weekdays from 3-7 p.m. on 97.5 FM and 1280 AM The Zone. Twitter: @GordonMonson.