"What crops do they raise in this country?" the officer asked. ... "Youngens," she said. "Youngens fer the wars and them factories." -- Harriette Arnow, "The Dollmaker," 1954

"You want to find you a way to motivate a young man from West Virginia? You tell him that carrying that football or chasing the man carrying that football can run him right out of those mines." -- Bobby Bowden, 2017

MONONGAH AND CLARKSBURG, W.Va. -- There isn't a state in the union more simultaneously connected and disconnected than West Virginia. A swerving summer drive in the Mountaineer State rolls through nearly identical towns that on the map are only inches apart. In real life, it takes forever to get from one to the next, separated by hills and mountains, bridges and switchbacks. Those beautiful blockades all but ensure the inhabitants of one village often never know their neighbors just one town over.

That's why it took Nick Saban and Jimbo Fisher, two football-crazy West Virginians raised only 20 miles apart, nearly four decades to meet. Their first handshake took place not in the Appalachian Mountains, but 450 miles away, in East Lansing, Michigan.

When West Virginians are finally connected, it typically happens via the state's three blood vessels: the tunnels and shafts that chase the coal beneath the state's surface, the rivers that snake through the valleys, and football -- whether it be Friday night high school games, Saturday contests from Morgantown to Huntington, or Sunday afternoons spent watching the NFL to check in on native sons who have graduated from the first two.

That's how Saban and Fisher were finally united, through the game they learned from their fathers, that they played alongside those rivers, and that they used as a tow truck to pull them away from a life in those mines.

"It is pretty amazing that it took us that long to finally meet," says Fisher, 51, ahead of Saturday's matchup between his No. 3 Florida State Seminoles and Saban's top-ranked Alabama Crimson Tide (8 p.m. ET, ABC). "But there's certain places where, if you grew up there, it means you have an instant connection with someone just because they are from there, too. West Virginia is one of those places."

Saban was born on Halloween 1951 and grew up near Monongah, located 90 miles south of Pittsburgh along a Monongahela River tributary called Helen's Run, a creek that had a bad habit of flooding the family house in the spring. His father was known as Big Nick and he was a hard man, working a series of jobs to stay out of the mines. He opened a service station and a restaurant-turned-Dairy Queen across street. Big Nick's edge was sanded daily by his wife, Mary, hoping to offset her husband's bluntness with daughter Dianna and Nick Jr., known to this day by people in the area by the nickname bestowed upon him by his big sis, simply "Brother."

Where father and son ultimately bonded was on the football field. Big Nick recognized a need for youth sports and started a Pop Warner program for his son and his classmates. They named themselves after the most potent form of coal, the Black Diamonds, and they played on a field adjacent to one of the area's biggest mines. While the Black Diamonds ran drills beneath the booming voice of Big Nick, men dug for black diamonds beneath their field.

Nick Saban credits his father for the discipline and work ethic that has become his trademark at Alabama. Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

"My dad was the hardest-working man I've ever seen," Saban, 65, recalls. "He was demanding and that could be hard. But he set the bar for me at a very young age, a work ethic that has never gone away."

Fisher was born 14 years later in Clarksburg, downstream from Monongah via the West Fork River, and grew up on a farm in Glen Falls. His father was known as Big Jim. He was a lot more fun than Big Nick, patriarch of a household of laughter that included his wife, Gloria, and two sons. Jim Jr. became Jimbo because "there were already so many Jims in the family, my aunt said, 'We gotta call you something else' and that was Jimbo." Unlike the elder Saban, Big Jim hadn't been able to avoid a hardhat and headlamp. He worked the mines during the overnight shift, returning home just as the sun rose to put in another full day's work on the Fisher farm, Jimbo bailing hay at his side.

Like the Sabans, Big Jim and Jimbo connected through sports. Jimbo became a three-sport star at Clarksburg's Liberty High School. Meanwhile, people chattered about Big Jim's ability to hit a softball into the nearby mountaintops.

"He looked so big, I swear he could have picked up the cattle with his hands and just moved them around if he'd wanted to," Jimbo says of Big Jim. "One night we were coming home late from a [stock car] race and came up on a bad, bad wreck. A woman was trapped inside and they were trying to get to her out with a crowbar. Dad told them to get the hell out of the way and just ripped the door off the car. Like Superman."

The personalities and the child-rearing approaches of the Big fathers were different, but they had the same mission: keeping their sons above ground. When either of the boys was caught slacking off in school, he endured a timeless West Virginia fatherhood tradition.

"My dad was the hardest-working man I've ever seen. He was demanding, and that could be hard. But he set the bar for me at a very young age, a work ethic that has never gone away." Alabama coach Nick Saban

In 1975, 10-year-old Jimbo decided schoolwork wasn't for him. He was perfectly happy to play ball and swim in the river. So Big Jim took his son to work, descending into the bowels of Clinchfield Mine No. 3. He handed young Jimbo a shovel and told him to start digging. "It was like a damn grave down there. I said, 'Get me out of here, man, I've got to start studying,'" Jimbo says.

A decade earlier, Saban received a D in eighth grade music because he refused to sing in front of the class. That also earned him a trip on the elevator. "Dad took me into the mines and said, 'If you don't get an education, this is where you're going to end up.' So that was the last time I ever went down there," the coach recalls. "I have a tremendous amount of respect for all the people who are coal miners, but it's not something I wanted to."

Among those people were both his grandfathers. In the dawn hours of Nov. 20, 1968, Saban's maternal grandfather, Harry "Pap" Conaway, was walking across the parking lot to start his shift at the Consol No. 9 mine when an explosion shook the ground beneath him so strongly it was felt more than 10 miles away. Saban remembers seeing towers of smoke spitting from columns of flame that blasted more than 150 feet out of the mouth of the cave and into the sky. After fighting the fires for a week, the mine was sealed off to starve the flames of oxygen, trapping 78 victims inside. More than a decade later, the remains of those men were still being recovered.

Saban knew or at least knew of nearly every man killed. He still thinks about Dewey Tarley, a member of the midnight shift in No. 9. Tarley was a regular at a local roadhouse named Meff's, where the Monongah High Lions were invited to play free pinball after wins. They won a lot.

When the Consol No. 9 explosion happened, the Lions were only a few weeks away from winning the West Virginia Class A state title. Saban, their quarterback, spent a lot of time that fall hanging out by the pinball machine.

"Dewey Tarley ... he played Johnny Cash, man. 'I hear that train a coming, rolling 'round the bend' ... every damn day before he went to work," Saban said.

Almost exactly one year earlier, Thanksgiving 1967, Big Jim Fisher was at work when a spark ignited a pocket of methane gas. The explosion shattered one of his legs and burned his hands and face so badly he was almost unrecognizable. One section of his lips was melted into his gums and teeth. He spent the next four years in and out of the hospital and out of work.

This era of brutal accidents proved to be critical mass for the coal mining industry, which operated essentially unregulated. In February 1969, more than 40,000 miners across three states shut down the industry with an unauthorized strike. A march on the West Virginia Capitol building was held amid chants of, "No laws, no work!"

Later that year, Congress passed the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, the first attempt to alleviate needless pockets of dangerous gas and dust and the first real public acknowledgement of an ailment known as black lung.

It was too late to save Saban's grandfathers from it. Or his future father-in-law. Or Big Jim Fisher, who'd added black lung to his growing list of ailments.

Saban and Fisher, both star high school quarterbacks, dreamed of moving up the road to play for the West Virginia Mountaineers, but neither got the call from Morgantown. When Saban came out of Monongah High in 1969, Bobby Bowden was taking over at WVU. He ended up playing for Don James at Kent State, the end of his freshman year punctuated by the tragic shooting of students by the National Guard.

By the time Fisher graduated from Liberty High in '83, Bowden had long ago left West Virginia for Florida State. After a short stint with Clemson's baseball team, Fisher returned home to play quarterback for Bowden's son, Terry, at Salem College. When the coach took the head job at Samford University in 1987, Fisher followed him. He set NCAA Division III passing records on Saturdays and spent the other six days devouring film sent to Terry Bowden from his father in Tallahassee.

Jimbo Fisher's childhood in West Virginia set the tone for a successful coaching career that he hopes brings another national title this season. Joe Robbins/Getty Images

"No matter what I did, there was always some sort of connection back to West Virginia," Fisher says. "I was either playing for a school there, or even after I left, I was playing for a coach or learning from a coach with ties back to West Virginia."

Over the next dozen years, Fisher and Saban climbed their respective coaching ladders, stops that included Samford, Auburn, Ohio State, Toledo, the NFL and Michigan State. Saban even put in a couple of years in Morgantown as defensive backs coach. Every summer and every Christmas -- bowl games willing -- they returned home to see their families, only 20 miles apart. Their names became part of every story written about West Virginia's so-called "Cradle of Coaching," the north central valley that had produced Saban, Fisher, John McKay and one of Fisher's former coaches at Salem, Rich Rodriguez.

But they'd never met. Not until December 1999. That's when Saban, about to leave Michigan State for LSU, summoned Fisher and a fellow West Virginian, legendary offensive line coach Rick Trickett of Masontown, 35 miles east of Monongah. Earlier that year, Trickett had gone back home to be the head coach at Glenville College.

"I was still at my house at Michigan State and I called Trick," Saban remembers. "I had seen Cincinnati, and they'd damn near beat Ohio State. We played Ohio State that year, so I saw the game, and I was wondering to myself, who's the coordinator at Cincinnati? I asked Trick, and he said, 'It's Jimbo. Jimbo's from Clarksburg!' So I had Jimbo and Trickett both come out to my house at Michigan."

"It was really, really comfortable immediately," Fisher says of the meeting. "You've got three guys from West Virginia, talking about home and talking about football."

Fisher remembers the two-hour chat with Saban as politely intense. "He was very direct. He knew what he wanted and you could tell he was an in-charge guy. He knew what he wanted and how he wanted it."

It wasn't scary at all. If anything, it was familiar. It felt like home. "Talking with Nick was very similar to what I grew up with," Fisher adds.

Says Saban: "I hired them both on the spot."

"There's certain places where, if you grew up there, it means you have an instant connection with someone just because they are from there, too. West Virginia is one of those places." Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher

A few days later, the two West Virginians were moving south to Baton Rouge, where they won 48 games over five seasons, including the 2003 national championship.

"Practices were intense, man," Fisher says. "Nick is running the defense with a bunch of first-round draft picks all over it and I'm running the offense with a bunch of first-round draft picks all over it. One difference is that Nick is all serious all the time. So, sometimes I'd like to have a little fun, you know, just laugh or joke around or something during practice. It was to loosen up the guys, but it was also to get under his skin a little."

It was Jimbo vs. Saban, sure. But it was just as much Big Jim vs. Big Nick.

"In a lot of ways, we're similar, certainly in our approach to the game, striving for perfection on the field," Saban explains. "I think that's inevitable because of our similar backgrounds and the great coaches we've both learned under. But there are also differences, for sure."

Most noticeably, to be from the same area, they sound nothing alike. Saban's accent is more Midwest than West Virginia, while Fisher is straight-up hillbilly and proud of it. "I think I've spent more time in the woods than Nick has," says Fisher, a lifelong hunter. "The turkeys taught me how to talk like this."

After one year, Trickett left LSU to take a job back home at West Virginia under Rodriguez. At the end the '04 season, Saban departed for his ill-fated stint with the Miami Dolphins before taking over at Alabama in '07. That same year Fisher moved to Tallahassee to serve under Bobby Bowden as his designated successor.

On Saturday night in Atlanta, the trio will be reunited. Saban and Fisher will square off for the first time as head coaches, leading the highest-ranked teams ever to meet in a season-opening contest. Trickett now serves as Fisher's assistant head coach. It will be the first time they've shared a field since 2000, but not the first time they have teamed up.

"A year ago, Trick called me up and said, 'We need your help,'" Saban explains. "He'd gone back home over summer like we all do and seen firsthand what had happened. They needed our help."

On June 23, 2016, in what the National Weather Service described as a "1,000-year event," 10 inches of rain over only 12 hours transformed the rivers of southern West Virginia into raging flash floods that destroyed hundreds of homes and killed 23 people. Trickett received phone calls from desperate football coaches throughout the state. Many of their fields and stadiums were on the flat lands alongside those rivers. From Pop Warner to small colleges, teams were looking at canceling their 2016 seasons. Trickett went home and told Fisher. Then he called Saban, Rodriguez and any other name he could think of out of the West Virginia coaching cradle.

"I know that from the outside that might not seem that important, saving football," Saban continues. "But you think about what football did for me, for Jimbo, for Trick, for all those kids who had something to do other than get into trouble. If I had missed just one season of football as a kid, I don't know if I'm where I am today."

Trickett started a drive recruiting schools in Florida and Alabama to donate uniforms and gear to send to needy teams in West Virginia. The moment Saban and Fisher joined in and put their muscle behind it, that campaign took off.

"We don't play if it isn't for them," Clay County High coach Jason Nichols says. The day before the floods he'd just had thousands of dollars of equipment delivered and stowed away in the locker room. The next day that entire locker room had been washed away. So was the entire preseason, as team members were occupied 24 hours a day salvaging what was left of their homes. But the Panthers played a full season, using gear donated from at least four states as well as the Pittsburgh Steelers. That season started with a visit and pep talk from Fisher and Trickett, who also delivered a message from Saban. "We received a lot of the attention, but we were far from alone. They saved teams all up and down this river. They saved these kids' spirits. They gave them hope."

Fisher beams when he talks about his visit to Clay County. "Something my dad taught me, and I know Nick's dad taught him, was to never forget where you came from. Those are the people who looked out for us and showed us a way to something better. Now it's our job to do the same."

Those comments came only a few days after returning from his annual summer visit to Glen Falls. He now owns a few hundred acres there, property that backs right up to the Fisher family farm, where mother Gloria, now 80, still lives.

Big Jim died in 1994 of a heart attack, coming after a series of strokes and coughing through that cursed black lung. He was 62. Big Nick passed long before that. In 1973, while jogging alongside Helen's Run, he also suffered a heart attack. He was 46. When Bobby Bowden heard, he offered Nick Jr. a graduate assistant position at WVU so he could be closer to home, even though he'd never met him. ("I knew his dad, and that's all I needed to know," Bowden says now.) Saban chose to stay at Kent State, but he has never forgotten the gesture or what -- and where -- it represents.

Neither Big Jim nor Big Nick will be in attendance in Atlanta on Saturday night. But their boys will be running the show at the biggest showcase of the game they both loved. The game that ran them up and out of those mines.

"Hell, I loved it," Saban says of West Virginia. "There was just a lot of good people. It wasn't the most affluent area, but it was just a lot of hard-working people, good people. I wouldn't trade my childhood and my high school, my friends I have there, all of that. I wouldn't trade that for anything."