Two weeks ago, I received more compliments from men sidling up to me than I have gotten since I last possessed a beach body during the Farrah Fawcett era 45 years ago. But alas, it was not my glorious silver hair, my rapier wit or my Irish good looks that attracted swarms of male attention.

Nope. It was my jacket. Specifically, my father’s 40-plus-year-old University of Notre Dame jacket, which I wore to the UND-Boston College game Nov. 1 in Boston. The experience taught me that sometimes sports has far less to do with competition, and more to do with memories.

If you subscribe, I will be ever so grateful!

I wasn’t supposed to be there. With my encouragement, my husband Pete had purchased tickets to the game so he and our son Tim could attend. I often don’t enjoy live sporting events — I’m too small, and I often have to fight to see the action, particularly when the crowd leaps to its feet — so I wished the two of them well.

But over several days, Pete had second thoughts.

“You go,” he said. “Your father went to Notre Dame. He played football there.”

“Yes, but he always said he was mostly, ‘cannon fodder for the varsity squad,’” I said.

“But you’ve always said you wanted to see a Notre Dame game,” Pete said.

Tim in sun, me in shadow, but both of us happy.

That much was true. In the 1980s, my dad invited me several times to join him on organized bus trips from Buffalo to South Bend to see a football game — a nearly 12-hour jaunt one way — but, killjoy that I am, I could never bring myself to attend a bus trip in which every single bus passenger would get a Bloody Mary at 7 a.m. to kick off the journey. To my Dad, that was part of the fun. But his drinking made me fearful as a child, irritated as an adult, and in my early years of trying to stay sober, I could not imagine attending. After he died in 1987, I wondered, despite our complicated relationship, if I should have gone after all.

Pete insisted I go to the game in his place.

I finally relented.

I dug out my dad’s Notre Dame jacket, which my brother Seamus had given my son when he was a teenager. “Tim, do you want to wear your grandfather’s jacket?” I said.

He looked at me in disbelief. “Mom, that jacket hasn’t fit me since I was 15,” he said.

True. My son is 6 feet, 2 inches tall. My father was a head shorter.

I tried it on. It was loose, but fit fine over my layered clothing.

After Tim and I drove 90 miles, we parked, caught the “T” (Boston’s nickname for its mass transit), disembarked and began to walk the mile or so to the stadium.

Then the compliments began.

“Hey, great jacket,” men would say. Every time, I would reply that I wore my dad’s jacket, that he played football for Notre Dame, but usually warmed the bench, and that he had passed away in 1987. My explanation would open the floodgates. Their eyes would go wide, and their own stories would begin. They would explain their own ties to the university or what inspired them. Sometimes, it was just being Irish. Sometimes, it was the remembrance of watching a game with their own fathers, alive only in memory. The ties went deep.

My Dad never stopped talking about his college years.

One man told me his favorite uncle was a Catholic priest who had been on staff at the university. “I go to South Bend every year to lay flowers on his grave…and to see a game, of course,” he said with a wink. Then he turned serious. “You should go there, you know, for your dad,” he said.

“Maybe,” I said.

My father never stopped talking about his college years. My sister Claudia said once, with the pointed sarcasm of an adolescent, that she was pretty sure his life stopped on graduation day in 1944. The rest of us agreed. His stories reflected, to me, his longing for the carefree days before he had a family and six kids to support.

But maybe it was that the school became his second family, a celebration of his Irish heritage, his beloved Catholic faith, and all the endless possibilities of his life before worry, financial struggle and disappointment intervened. The school had been a place where everyone knew his name. No wonder that, in his 60s, he took that long bus trip.

In the stadium, hearing story after story in between plays, I couldn’t help but notice how many people had a personal reason for attending that went well beyond competition, often entangled with emotions, memories of someone they loved, or pride in someone still with them.

One young spectator in his teens waved a poster with a big, color picture of his sister, a Notre Dame cheerleader, on a squad nearly as athletic as the players themselves (they were utterly amazing).

“See that?,” he yelled as the cheerleaders did one gravity-defying flip in midair after another. “That’s MY SISTER down there!” We all cheered for him and for her, although I couldn’t help but reflect that when I was his age, Notre Dame barred women from attending. But times do change, I thought, cheering a touchdown and appreciating the good seats my husband bought. The day had turned blustery. The game was hard-fought. In the end, Notre Dame won, but not by as much as had been predicted.

Throughout, my Dad’s jacket kept me warm. As did my memories of him.