since those two are hooking up in the Elite 8 round Saturday......Its hard to believe Notre Dame hasn't been to the Elite 8 round since the '78-'79 season as well as their only Final Four was during the prior year.

There was a time in the 1970's when this was one of the bigger games in the country every year. Kentucky and Notre Dame played each other every year from 1960 to 1981 -- in Louisville each year-- prior to UK and Louisville playing one another.

Starting the prior season through the end of the yearly series, the game was televised by NBC --on a delayed basis. Its unfathomable now to imagine such a setup with various electronic gadgets to give immediate updates, but this was 35 yrs ago.And the game evidently drew a decent rating since Saturday Night Live had to be bumped.

Here's NBC's Dick Enberg and Al McGuire interviewing Joe B. Hall and Dwight Anderson after the game.

Kentucky, ranked #13 beat Notre Dame, ranked #2 81-76 in what turned out to be one of Kentucky's biggest wins of the season.The defending National Champs only had Kyle Macy returning and that caught up with them. Kentucky went 10-8 in the SEC during a not so strong conference season where LSU won the title at 14-4 including the Tigers' first ever regular season sweep of UK.

But the SEC revived the post season conference tournament for the first time in 27 yrs. Kentucky made the most of the extra games downing Ole Miss, Alabama and LSU before losing the tourney championship in overtime to Tennessee. The run was good enough to get UK an NIT bid. Had they beaten Tennessee (who wound up winning all three meetings with UK that year) to secure the SEC's automatic bid they probably would have been matched up with Notre Dame in the second round -- in Murfreesboro, Tennessee of all places.

Notre Dame was continuing its approximately 10 year run as one of the top 10 teams in the country. Digger Phelps' first ND team in 1971-1972 was every bit as bad as their 6-20 mark with a 94-29 loss at Indiana and a 114-56 loss in Los Angeles to UCLA.But the next year they were NIT runner-ups, ended UCLA's 88 winning streak in 1974 and continued playing great basketball. The Irish did make the Final Four in 1978 after pummeling fellow MW independent DePaul, 84-64.

Notre Dame had some big names playing for them at the time such Orlando Woolridge (52) and Kelly Tripucka on the right. (Woolridge was from north Louisiana. Taking a page from North Carolina's Dean Smith in playing at least one game in a player's home state, Phelps took the easy route in the 1979-1980 season as the Irish and Woolridge played Tulane instead of LSU.Sadly the night of the Irish-Wave game LSU had many more things to deal with.That was the night the plane carrying new football coach Bo Rein's plane crashed into the Atlantic.)

The Irish recovered from the Kentucky game and received a one seed in the Mideast Regional in the first year of NCAA seeding. Notre Dame (and the 1-4 seeds) received a bye into the second round where they defeated Tennessee, 73-67 at Middle Tennessee's Murphy Center.But the Irish would go on to lose the Mideast Final to Magic Johnson and two seed Michigan State in the regional final, 80-68 at Indianapolis' Market Square Arena (the site of the 1980 Final Four.)