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Today, after a long week, here’s something to brighten your Friday:

Our story begins at the dawn of the 20th century, when the young men (and, possibly, some of the very few women) of the state’s first public university, the University of California in Berkeley, used to display their spirit by essentially rioting.

Fires would crop up around the time of various football contests, and in particular, the annual game against the university’s cross-Bay rival, Stanford — that is, until 1901.

University administrators decided they’d had enough of the random conflagrations and helped start the university’s official Rally Committee, a group of men they charged with becoming the “guardians of all campus traditions,” as one history of the group put it.