Vince Lombardi was adrift at age 26, searching in vain for a purpose. He had already decided against being a priest, or a lawyer, or a debt collector, or a butcher like his old man. As something of a weak link on Fordham's famous offensive line, the Seven Blocks of Granite, Lombardi had no dream of making a deferred run at an NFL roster and no vision of coaching at a higher level than he had played.

So he was going to be a teacher at St. Cecilia High School in Englewood, N.J., and see where that took him. His Fordham teammate -- and St. Cecilia football coach -- Andy Palau, had hired him to be an assistant, but winning wasn't everything, or the only thing, when Lombardi took the job in 1939. He thought his chemistry, physics, biology and Latin classes might serve his ambitions better than any sweep he diagrammed for Palau's Saints.

Basketball wasn't going to be his game, either, even though the school's eventual athletic director, Father Tim Moore, would pay Lombardi a couple hundred bucks to run the boys' varsity on the side. "Father Moore took a vow of poverty," Vince used to joke, "then lived up to it with me."

This would be Lombardi's first head-coaching job of any kind. In 1942, after Palau, the former quarterback at Fordham, returned to his alma mater, Lombardi took over the football program, too. And so it was at a Catholic school of fewer than 400 boys and girls, once standing 11 miles from where the Vince Lombardi Trophy will be awarded to either the Denver Broncos or Seattle Seahawks at MetLife Stadium, that the son of a Brooklyn butcher learned something he was never given the chance of learning later at Fordham, or at West Point, or with the New York Giants.

On Jan. 28, 1959, the day he took over the 1-10-1 Green Bay Packers, Lombardi had head-coaching experience at St. Cecilia and nowhere else. As much as he demanded excellence, or at least the pursuit of it, from his students, Lombardi educated himself there as a leader and motivator, as someone who could get the best out of a sophomore hiding in the back of his chemistry class as easily as he could compel his fullback to hit his assigned hole with unmatched rage.

The teacher was ultimately teaching himself how to build the Packers into the greatest dynasty the NFL has known, and it happened by accident. Palau, a Bristol, Conn., high school legend who ended up signing with the New York Yankees out of college, rooming with Phil Rizzuto in the minors before failing to beat out Bill Dickey behind the plate, had no idea what he was hiring in Lombardi, other than a guy who couldn't take a joke.

According to Palau's son, Mark, the Fordham teammates were heading out to a big dance at the school, the two of them dressed in tuxes as they prepared to pick up their future wives, when Palau slipped green dye into Lombardi's hair gel. As soon as the lineman noticed his dark hair turning the color of lettuce, he grabbed a fire ax hanging nearby, chased the quarterback down a staircase and threw the ax in his direction, not missing by much.

Their partnership at St. Cecilia, Mark Palau would say three quarters of a century later, "was like a good-cop, bad-cop routine." At halftime, when the more reserved Palau sensed that his team needed a jolt, he gave the floor to his fire-breathing assistant, Lombardi.

"And hey, as it turned out," Mark Palau said, "my father got the best man for the job."

Lombardi, who would have turned 100 last June, has been dead 43 years and yet lives on in the hallways of high school gymnasiums and NFL practice facilities and Fortune 500 companies, his old-school quotations posted to inspire men and women to reach higher. To work harder. To play hurt.

But framed pep talks can't tell you what Lombardi's players and students can tell you, the players and students who were there when he was trying to find his own way. The surviving boys and girls of wartime St. Cecilia can tell you what it was like when Lombardi was in his 20s and 30s and burning a hole through you with that stare of his, or signaling a volcanic eruption with that rapid blinking of his eyes, or daring you to hit him with a forearm shiver on the practice field. They can tell you how he used to bang his college ring against a blackboard to get your attention in physics, and how he once chased out of the gym a basketball player who had dared to mock his habit of borrowing strategies from college teams he scouted at Madison Square Garden.

They can tell you how he could gauge a student's untapped potential within a week or two of class time, and how he understood the necessity of building up any player he'd spent a stormy afternoon tearing down. So these are the stories from some of the oldest Lombardi Saints, ages 84 to 91, many of them still living within a short drive of the high school that shut down in 1986, and of the grand old Gothic church Lombardi attended every day. Some told their stories over the phone, some at a gathering at a New Jersey restaurant. The stories belong to men who played football and basketball for him, and to a woman who played six-on-six basketball for him and who still sounds ready to run through a wall on his command. They still hear him as if he were standing before them, spittle flying, his voice loud enough to be heard over the jitterbug music playing on the cafeteria jukebox at lunchtime.

Yes, Vincent Thomas Lombardi is very much alive to these oldest living Saints.