Auburn University and the University of Virginia, who meet in the Final Four of the NCAA tournament this weekend, have two more things in common. The first is their school colors: orange and blue. The second is how they came to wear those colors: through petty theft.

One school stole them from the other school. And the other school stole them from an unsuspecting bunch of British rowers.

Their clandestine dispute started on the rivers of England a century ago, traced its way through American history and continues with a national basketball game played in a football stadium with both schools dressed in the same colors.

“It’s going to be hard to tell which fan base is which,” said Mike Jernigan, biographer of George Petrie, the man who founded Auburn’s football program and engineered the color robbery.

The saga can be found by trawling through school archives, 1800s and early-1900s yearbooks, school newspapers, and interviews with biographers, historians and documentarians.