Columnist

When two college basketball coaches agree to play a preseason scrimmage and boom! — nearly 19,000 seats sell out almost instantly, at prices up to $200 each — something bigger than hoops is going on.

I had plenty of time to reflect on this while inching forward amid an acreage of humanity toward the doors of the Sprint Center in downtown Kansas City, Mo. It was a sun-washed, breeze-kissed Sunday afternoon. Half the people, by rough estimate, wore gold and black, the colors of the University of Missouri. Half wore the blue and crimson of the University of Kansas.

For more than a century, these schools kept up one of the great rivalries in college sports. As rich in tradition as Ohio State vs. Michigan or Alabama vs. Auburn, Mizzou and the Jayhawks carried more into their clashes: a heavy freight of history. You probably learned in school about Fort Sumter in April 1861, but the true first salvos of the Civil War were fired here in the 1850s, where the Show Me State shared a border with the territory known as Bleeding Kansas.

Beginning in 1891, veterans of that gory fighting watched young men of the next generation square off on the gridiron. They viewed the on-field mayhem through eyes that had seen houses burned, villages ransacked, men and boys massacred on both sides of the Missouri-Kansas line. Now the line was drawn again, with a pigskin poised upon it. "What was football but barely legalized fighting?" Sally Jenkins asked in her captivating history of the sport's beginnings, "The Real All Americans." "It was war without death."

A few years later, a Canadian gym teacher named James Naismith joined the Kansas faculty. He brought with him rules for a game he had invented involving a ball and two peach baskets. Students in Lawrence, Kan., and Columbia, Mo., found they loved battling on the basketball court just as much as they enjoyed fighting over football.

Decade followed decade. Parents passed the complicated passions of the deep-set conflict to their children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They remembered the routs, nail-biters, upsets, near-misses, flukes, wowzers and hard-fought ties. They recalled 1911, when Missouri hosted Kansas for history's first "homecoming" game. And 1951, when future NBA Hall-of-Famer Clyde Lovellette of the Jayhawks stomped on a floored Missouri player, prompting a near-riot. And 1960, when Kansas, led by budding star John Hadl, upset Missouri's No. 1-ranked football team — only to have the result reversed after the season on a technicality. (In Lawrence, they still count it as a win.)

The rivalry riveted the nation in 2007, when the largest college-football audience of the year tuned in to see No. 2-ranked Kansas take on No. 3 Missouri under the lights at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City. Nearly 81,000 people filled the NFL venue: the second largest crowd in its history. Thanks to an upset elsewhere of top-ranked Louisiana State University, the Tigers' win left Missouri ranked No. 1 at the end of the regular season.

And big TV did the rivalry in, you could argue. In 2010 and 2011, the lure of television money threatened to destroy the Big 12 athletic conference — which might have stranded its Midwestern schools without a league to call home. Missouri grabbed a lifeline offered by the mighty Southeastern Conference, and the Jayhawks — at the gut level that matters so much in life — felt betrayed. Their final big-sport confrontation was worthy of all that had gone before, a stunning one-point win in overtime for Kansas in their 268th basketball meeting.

KU vowed it would be their last.

That was Feb. 25, 2012, and despite wishful talk in certain Kansas City precincts, Kansas kept its word. But you can't spell heartland without heart. After the brutal hurricane season decimated communities from the Caribbean to South Texas, Bill Self, beloved coach of the Jayhawks, decided to set aside bygones for a day to raise a ton of money for relief efforts.

The Tigers, under new head coach Cuonzo Martin, grabbed the chance to showcase their heralded freshman recruits, brothers Michael Jr. and Jontay Porter. So there we were, packed floor to rafters for a game that meant nothing and everything. In a back-and-forth contest, the cheers alternated from one side of the arena to the other. But the biggest cheer was for the money raised: well north of $1.75 million.

The final score said Kansas by six. But in the official records, the exhibition game never happened.

It mattered only to us fans. We needed this timely reminder that even deadly strife can soften into rivalry, and rivalry can sweeten with good will. So much these days conspires to drive us apart, but with the right spirit, our differences can make us stronger. We have nothing to fear from rivalries, and everything to fear from hatreds. The difference, on this delightful Sunday, was clear.

Read more from David Von Drehle's archive.