I was a little surprised and amused to find out recently that I am a legend. Well, not just me, but my college rugby club when I played at St. Bonaventure University.

I went to the National Collegiate Rugby championship tournament April 25 in Maryland with another alumnus to see our alma mater compete. We were watching a match and I noticed a man standing next to us wearing a Slippery Rock University Rugby jacket. He is an assistant coach.

I leaned over and told him that when I was at St. Bonaventure, we played in a tournament at Slippery Rock in Pennsylvania. He smiled.

“I heard about that,” he said.

He quickly texted his wife, who was his girlfriend at the time of the tournament in 1984, to say he was standing with me. She had attended the Slippery Rock tournament and the rugby party afterward. Then he texted the current Slippery Rock head coach, who played for the team back then, and told him. 

“Hahahaha. Oh boy. Ask him about …,” the head coach texted back, mentioning specific details of the party 42 years earlier.

Before the Slippery Rock tournament, we heard that they would award a trophy for the best partying team, called the Best Overall Team. We were determined to bring it home.

A post-game party hosted by the home team is an old rugby tradition. It includes dancing, singing and games.

It’s not as wholesome as that may sound. The party often gets out of control and is commonly known as The Third Half, a nod to it being an important part of the game and the likelihood of injuries.

I’ve never seen anything quite like a rugby party. I can only imagine a gathering of pirates or vikings would be similar.

It was sort of like the barroom scene in “Star Wars: A New Hope.” Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi may have best described the Mos Eisley Spaceport and a rugby party when he said: “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy."

These are few examples of activities that I recall from parties:

Jousting. Two players sit in chairs at opposite sides of the room, each holding a pool cue as they face one another. A teammate pushes each toward the other, simulating a Medieval horseback joust, as the riders try to unseat each other with the pool cues.

Human bowling. Beer is splashed on the barroom floor. Ten players line up like bowling pins. A player slides through the beer and hits the human pins. One time a teammate with bad aim slid face-first into a wall, cutting his head across an eyebrow.

Old MacDonald Had a Farm. Sung to the childhood tune by the same name, players act out the animal characters. Ram: bend over and run into someone with your head. Whale: spit a mouthful of beer in the air, simulating a blowhole. Duck: throw a punch at the face of the person standing next to you.

I felt a little sad for the St. Bonaventure rugby club that played in the tournament in April. Sure, they are national champions. But they left the tournament on a bus, as the rugby party is no longer a college staple due to changes in drinking age laws and efforts to halt bad behavior.

But back in the day, we walked away from Slippery Rock University with the Best Overall Team trophy.

We were so impressive that come Monday morning, the president of Slippery Rock University called the president of St. Bonaventure University – a Franciscan priest –  to tell him all about it. And to say we could never return.

I was proud to learn in April that to this day, they still remember us with a mix of awe and horror at a college nestled among forests and farmland in western Pennsylvania.

Working It Out is the reincarnation of a column by the same name that reporter Kevin Conlon wrote weekly for more than six years for the Cortland Standard newspaper, where he worked as city editor before joining the Cape Gazette staff.