This being almost 2018, the game will have “high-tech uniforms and cleats and more footballs than you know what to do with,” said John Grant, the bowl’s executive director. It also will come almost precisely 125 years since that game with one waterlogged football, when Biddle University of Charlotte traveled 43 miles to Livingstone College of Salisbury, N.C., when 43 miles was so much longer than today.

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That game, in snowfall on Livingstone’s front lawn Dec. 27, 1892, became the first between historically black colleges, and Grant thinks of it repeatedly. He thinks of the “fans who came by wagons, who walked, who came on horseback.” He thinks of the fans who “came and stood around the field in snow to watch this game that they had never seen people like them play.” He said, “They had to be cold and wet.”

They saw a game for which players equipped their street shoes with cleats. They played in uniforms sewn by the women in Livingstone’s industrial department. Their football realities mirrored those around the country in a sport that began in 1869: They wore no helmets. They wore no pads. They attempted no passes.

To appear upon the front lawn in Salisbury, the team from Biddle (which would become Johnson C. Smith University) traveled by segregated train car, then by horse-led wagons from the train station. The teams had pitched in for the regulation football. Grant tries to picture the fans, huddled around in the cold, surely wearing hats. “Fans carry a sport,” he said. “My hat goes off certainly to the young men who played, but my hat really goes off to the fan who made the journey. . . . They had to stay in houses with friends and family. Today we fill up hotels.”

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For this third edition that happens around the 125th anniversary, the Celebration Bowl hit upon a doozy. It matches an 11-0 team (North Carolina A&T) with an 11-1 team (Grambling), and it matches a coach who used to coach at Grambling (North Carolina A&T’s Rod Broadway) with a coach (Grambling’s Broderick Fobbs) whose father (Lee Fobbs Jr.) coaches his running backs but also used to coach North Carolina A&T.

It teems with players profoundly unaccustomed to losing, with Grambling unbeaten since its opener at Football Bowl Subdivision squad Tulane, and North Carolina A&T among only two unbeaten teams (alongside James Madison) in the second division of college football, the Football Championship Subdivision. For the second straight year, North Carolina A&T defeated an FBS opponent, this time Charlotte, after Kent State in 2016.

“I think it’ll be a long time now [for another MEAC unbeaten team], the way college football is going, having to play those money games,” Broadway said in Greensboro this week, referring to those games in which smaller schools collect larger checks by playing at FBS schools. “I don’t know if you’ll ever see that again in this conference, unless you get a team that’s not playing the money games.”

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His seventh Aggies team, so dominant that its average game ended 36-12, will carry that unbeaten blessing/burden, and it will hover over the match. His quarterback, Lamar Raynard, a Walter Payton Award nominee with a touchdown-interception ratio of 26-5, will play opposite a quarterback, DeVante Kincade, a Walter Payton Award nominee who started off at Mississippi and whose touchdown-interception ratio sings at 21-3. (The Walter Payton Award, for the top offensive player in the FCS, will be presented Jan. 5.)

Broadway, 62, who played defensive line at North Carolina, is the only coach to win HBCU national titles at three places (counting North Carolina Central, Grambling and North Carolina A&T at the 2015 Celebration Bowl). He just accompanied Raynard to New York for an award and said this week in Greensboro: “You know what? For an old country boy like me, too many buildings, too many people and too many cars and too many horns on those cars.” Fobbs, 43, who played running back for Eddie Robinson at Grambling, called it “a matchup of all matchups and a matchup for the ages. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I want to play the best, and I’m sure they do as well.”

Grant, overseeing the whole of it, said, “We couldn’t have asked for a better situation than what we have,” and, “No, you can’t script it any better than this,” and, “I can’t wait.”

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It has the winning programs from the first two Celebration Bowls, in this toddler bowl that tries to follow where bowls such as the Pelican (1970s, three games) and Heritage (1990s, nine games), matching MEAC and SWAC teams, went dormant. By the stat sheets, the Celebration drew 35,528 in 2015, when North Carolina A&T beat Alcorn State, 41-34, and 31,096 in 2016, when Grambling beat North Carolina Central, 10-9. Grant yearns that the Celebration will become an enduring part of Atlanta’s burgeoning fabric, that it might lure spectators with no ties to either team.

For this time, he will think of the past, of the end of 1892, when Biddle got a sole touchdown and won 5-0, and an apparent game-tying touchdown by Livingstone, on a fumble return, was overruled because the snow had occluded the sideline, which lent the game another aspect Americans would relish ever since: a refereeing controversy.

“I get touched by thinking about 125 years,” Grant said. “This is my motivation. It’s a story I believe is important to constantly be told and repeated and reiterated, for fans to understand how powerful their role is . . .

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“Hopefully,” he said, “when you talk about that, in your mind, you’ll have a vision of what it looked like.”