Also in honor of this Saturday’s football game against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we bring you this poem from the November 1893 issue of the Trinity Archive.

A Girl on Foot-Ball

A girl is not allowed to play foot-ball
And to revel in the delights of a game.
It is only for boys, large, strong and tall
To win for themselves glory and fame.

And when the Trinity foot-ball team in honor roll
They proudly exclaim, “The girls aren’t in it here,”
But if they could see the “NORMAL” girls climb a ten-foot pole
They’d conclude that they were up it there.

At Trinity the boys all think they know
The reason the girls can’t play;
Just let them look in the “gym.” room door
And I guess they’ll believe what we say.

They say that we’re afraid to play
Because we can’t kick the ball aright
But I tell you don’t believe a word they say
For, if we chose, we could kick it out of sight.

But though we do not choose to play,
We can shout and wear the blue
And be able from the depths of our hearts to say
To Trinity we’ll always be loyal and true.

Three cheers for the boys who beat the “N. C. U!”
Long may they be champions of the State
And a girl that wears the Trinity blue
May they finally choose for their mate.

We wonder what the author of this poem—it’s signed “Anon.”—would have thought of 1935’s Pink Pants by Ralph Y. Hopton. This novel tells the story of Brünnehilde “Pussy” Downing, the Amazonian star of Bowlby University’s football team. Wearing pink sateen pants, she single-handedly decimates Harvard’s team, finishing her pummeling of each linebacker with her trademark cry, “I think you’re me-ee-an!”

(N.B.: Established in 1887, The Archive is one of the oldest continuously published literary magazines in the United States and the oldest student publication at Duke.)