For any college football fan under the age of 40, Florida State and Miami should be one of the annual meccas, a bigger deal than, say, a stodgy romp like Notre Dame-Michigan, and yes, the zeitgeist of Gen-X fandom weeps every time its memory of Danny Kanell dissolves into visions of Drew Weatherford. Christian Ponder and DeVontrey Richardson are on pace to rend garments. This is the game that weaned us on the sport's growing obsession with speed, "swagger," and defensive linemen who hunt quarterbacks like tyrannosaurs after proto-rodents. These kids today, they're going to associate Miami-FSU as a meh ACC tilt with lame quarterbacks. Like all kids in any era, they are so, so wrong.

It wasn't always this way. Let Brent Musburger take you back to late, great 1988 to set the stage for one of the rivalry's earlier blockbusters:

These teams didn't like it each other, and expressed their mutual distaste with attitude and flair, most creatively employed by Dexter Carter when a Cane tried to show him up in 1989:

For all the defensive firepower in this series, none of them summed up its ethos more succinctly Michael Barrow, at the expense of poor Tamarick Vanover in 1992:

A somber hat tip is in order also to the dedicated nostalgists who not only brought all of the fabled wide right/left disappointments under one cheesy ballad, but who painstakingly recreated the 1991 classic between the No. 1 Noles and No. 2 Canes on Tecmo Super Bowl, right down to the ill-fated Gerry Thomas kick that initiated the curse:

And so on, through roughly the hard-hitting Orange Bowl rematch at the end of the 2003 season. If anyone is obsessively recreating Saturday's depressingly low-stakes game via retro pixelation, truly theirs is passion that knows no bounds.