Its claim to being the first football game ever played at the University of Toronto is based on two fairly ambiguous arguments.

It wasn’t soccer. And it wasn’t rugby.

“That particular event was important for what it wasn’t,” says Paul Carson, a former U of T sports information director.

“The pickup rules that a bunch of pickup people played were not the two sports that were common at the time. They were something else.”

Click here for a photo gallery of the Blues team over the years.

Exactly what that something else was is not entirely clear, but it involved some of the kicking and carrying plays that would be recognized in modern football.

Regardless of its murky particulars, the university is marking that Nov. 9, 1861 tilt as the first “football” game ever played at the school (and perhaps the country and even the world).

And it’s celebrating the game’s 150th anniversary with a fundraising gala Wednesday at Hart House that will also pay homage to the storied past of a program that’s been beset by hard times in recent decades.

There was an era when Blues football was among the hottest tickets in Toronto, says Carson, who’s worked closely with the team for 50 years and helped produce a 200-page book on the team’s history that will be unveiled at the gala.

By the 1940s, Varsity Stadium had grown to accommodate more than 27,000 people, and often did for Blues games for the next two decades.

Carson says a gathering storm of circumstances led to a precipitous drop in the program’s quality and popularity in the 1970s — a decline that nearly saw it cancelled altogether in 1992.

These included the appearance of televised professional football in the 1960s, an increasingly shabby Varsity Stadium, a poor marketing machine and the lowering of the drinking age in 1971 from 21 to 18 .

“If you were under 21 and you couldn’t drink legally, where could you drink and not get caught? Well, football games,” says Carson, still the public announcer at Blues games.

The team’s on-field performance declined just as badly, with the Blues posting just seven victories though the millennium’s first decade and none between 2002 and 2007.

In its glory years the team not only produced huge crowds and winning seasons, but also dozens of remarkably successful Canadians. A handwritten roster from the seminal 1861 game lists the university’s future chancellor and federal cabinet minister Sir William Mulock and future U of T president James Louden amongst its 30 players.

Other luminaries include past Supreme Court of Canada Justice John Sopinka, former Toronto Maple Leafs owner Conn Smythe and world renowned physician Dr. Fraser Mustard. Former prime minister Lester B. Pearson was a coach.

Two names stand out: former Ontario Chief Justice Roy McMurtry and Bill Davis, past premier of the province.

“They were big, big, big,” Carson says. “The big difference though, McMurtry was a very good football player . . . Davis wasn’t that good.”

McMurtry, Carson says, was an all star and was voted to the Blue’s team of the century squad. Davis played in the Blue’s intermediate team and never cracked the intercollegiate lineup.

McMurtry himself recalls his football days between 1951 and 1954 with great fondness.

“The friendships that were made in those days continued for me for 6o years,” says the current York University chancellor.

“I’ve always felt that football was a very important experience for me. It was great team sport and that it was character building in many senses.”

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Current players see pieces of the team’s past each time they enter the new Varsity Stadium’s dressing room, which has been festooned with mementos of bygone greatness.

Quarterback Andrew Gillis, who just ended his fourth year as a starter going a respectable 3-5. says today’s players are inspired by these hearkening heirlooms.

“It gives you a little extra incentive to just try your hardest. I wish I could come back for another year,” says Gillis.