The Origin Of The Subway Alumni

Charles Pierce highlights the roots of the Notre Dame fan base everybody else loves to hate:

The old ones have mostly passed now, the immigrant fathers and mothers, and uncles and aunts, and grandparents who came over in the great waves from Europe, many of them fleeing failed revolutions of their own, except for the Irish, who were fleeing not only failed revolutions, but famine as well. They came here, Catholics many of them, and they built their own parishes in the images of the villages they'd all left behind. (My grandfather and grandmother grew up two miles from each other in North Kerry, but didn't meet until their villages reconstituted themselves as St. Peter Parish in south Worcester, Massachusetts.) And all of the parishes built schools, and then the demand grew so great that the great Catholic universities were built, and they became the dream palaces that the old ones built for their children and their children's children. That was how Holy Cross functioned in Worcester, and Boston College in Boston, and Fordham in New York, and Marquette in Milwaukee. But these were largely regional franchises. The home office was in northern Indiana.
That is why the Rockne movie is the real movie and why the dinner-table scene is the real scene. Because, for so many of the old ones, and their children and grandchildren, whether they went there or not, Notre Dame stood for the education they'd made central to their purchase on a place in their new country. And the football team represented the same kind of purchase on the life of their new country that DiMaggio did for the Italian immigrants in San Francisco and New York and, much later — and with much more blood and tragedy — what Jackie Robinson meant to those folks who came to the northern cities from the rural South, and found themselves in a land no less alien than that which confronted the European immigrants as they stepped onto the docks.
Don't talk Norwegian, talk American. We're all Americans now.

He's tired of the Fighting Irish.  I don't think he's alone.