For a time, announcing the Slippery Rock score lapsed, partly because of a technological period during which wires had ceased to exist but the Internet had not yet evolved to a place where scores of obscure Division II football games were instantly accessible. Dave Brandon, the Michigan athletic director from 2010 to 2014, remembered the tradition from his days as a player (for Michigan, not Slippery Rock) and brought it back several years ago.

In 1979, the connection between the universities became more formal when the marketing mastermind Don Canham, who was Michigan’s athletic director from 1968 to 1988, arranged for Slippery Rock to play its rival Shippensburg at the Big House. Slippery Rock played there again in 1981, against Detroit’s Wayne State, and last year, against Mercyhurst.

The 1979 game attracted 61,143 fans — still the Division II record and more than Michigan’s own game that day, which was at California.

John U. Bacon, an unofficial historian of Michigan football and the author of the recent book “Endzone,” painted that first Slippery Rock game as the ultimate triumph of Canham’s approach to marketing, which was to sell the game-day experience — the autumn colors, the tailgating, the community — over the team itself, be it Michigan or Slippery Rock.

“The ball’s pointy,” Bacon said. “If you can’t predict it, you can’t sell it.”

In other words: Slippery Rock will not always win, but it will always be called Slippery Rock.