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Close the Store, It’s the Year’s Big Game in Alabama

AUBURN, Ala. — The Saturday evening Mass at St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church here will be a cappella because the organist has football tickets. Weddings and funerals will be rarities. Car dealerships are expected to go dark. The J & M Bookstore will close at kickoff — and reopen after the game only if the home team wins.

The normal course of civil society in this state is transformed every year when Auburn University and the University of Alabama meet for what some believe is just a football game and what others see as a test of moral virtue. But the 78th matchup in what is now known as the Iron Bowl will be the first time the winner will grab the usual statewide bragging rights while simultaneously keeping its national title hopes alive and earning a spot in the Southeastern Conference championship game.

As a result, almost everything outside Jordan-Hare Stadium figures to sputter to a halt for a four-hour stretch on Saturday as top-ranked Alabama seeks an undefeated regular season, No. 4 Auburn enjoys its abrupt resurgence as a football power, and the state proves there are few limits to its infatuation with all things pigskin-related.

And the observances won’t end on Saturday. The Sunday sermon at the Auburn Church of Christ will be about humility because, as its sign along South College Street put it, “We’ll either have it or need it.”

“It’s gigantic. It’s for all the marbles,” said Eric Stamp, who owns a print shop in Auburn. “People change their Thanksgiving weekend plans to accommodate the Iron Bowl.” (For decades, the game was played in Birmingham, known for iron and steel production.)

The Alabama faithful concur. “Everyone knows going in that if your team loses, it will hurt you for decades. Just the mention of it in 25 years will cause certain people to retch in despair,” said Warren St. John, a former reporter for The New York Times whose book “Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer,” documenting the zeal of Crimson Tide supporters, was once the textbook for a University of Alabama course about the culture surrounding Southern football.

“People who don’t care about football in Alabama — and there aren’t many of those people — will have to pay attention to this game, because it’s going to impact so many people that they know,” Mr. St. John said.

The annual showdown is always a spectacle, even when one of the schools fields a middling squad. Last year, 101,821 people attended Alabama’s 49-0 drubbing of Auburn, which had finished that season with only three wins, at Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa.

Fewer fans will pack Auburn’s smaller stadium this year, but tens of thousands more will participate elsewhere in Lee County. Recreational vehicles began pouring into Auburn last weekend, and Jill Holt, who runs the University Station R.V. Resort with her husband, estimated that about 4,000 people would sleep or attend parties at the property.

The game has also been a boon for entrepreneurs with seats to spare. One broker this week sold a parking pass for $250, and some tickets — which have a face value of $95 — were listed for more than the state’s average monthly mortgage payment, $809. To accommodate fans without tickets, Auburn will open its basketball arena and televise the game.

But even before this year’s Iron Bowl became a college football colossus, it loomed large on the state’s social calendar.

A game-day wedding would be tantamount to sacrilege, for instance.

“If you’re from the state of Alabama and you have any loyalty to either university, you avoid that day at all costs,” Julie Bunkley, a local wedding planner, said. “I can’t even imagine a scenario where you could do a wedding in the city limits of Auburn during the Iron Bowl.”

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Msgr. William J. Skoneki whose organist is skipping Saturday Mass to attend the game.Credit...Dustin Chambers for The New York Times

She added, “It could happen elsewhere, and people would hate them for it.”

The dead don’t fare much better.

“People don’t want to go to a funeral on game day,” said Nathaniel Holloway, an Auburn funeral director who had to reroute a November procession to accommodate football traffic. “You can always have funerals on Sundays.”

At St. Michael’s, Msgr. William J. Skoneki said that although he was expecting a slim crowd for an a cappella mass, he anticipated seeing plenty of his flock on campus.

“I can see more of my inactive or occasional parishioners walking around before an Auburn game than I see in a month knocking on doors,” said Monsignor Skoneki, who will wear a clerical shirt outfitted with Auburn’s logo to the game before leaving around halftime to report to the pulpit.

To the delight of prison guards, inmates throughout the state will be permitted to take in the festivities from afar.

“You can have some heated rivalries, but generally speaking, when the games are on or it’s movie night, those are the times the inmates are most well behaved,” said Brian Corbett, an Alabama Department of Corrections spokesman.

Even people with little interest in football said they would have some loose connection to the brouhaha playing out on the gridiron.

Ali Van Tuyl, a social worker, said her fiancé was such an Auburn fan that he had asked her to refrain from using red fingernail polish because it was too close to a University of Alabama color. His entire family will not use Tide detergent, she said, because its name could be seen as paying homage to the wrong school.

“Even when there’s normal life going on, it’s not really normal because it’s game day,” said Ms. Van Tuyl, who moved to Alabama years ago. “In Oklahoma, you watch the game and you go home. At the Iron Bowl, everything is on hold for the week.”

Dr. Glenn M. Woods, an anesthesiologist in nearby Opelika, acknowledged as much. When he learned he was scheduled to be on call during the game, he made arrangements to switch with a University of Georgia fan so he could concentrate on the game and not the operating room.

“If it was any other game, I would not swap,” Dr. Woods said. “It’s a game you live for and you live by 365 days a year.”

Mr. St. John said the aftershocks were certain to reverberate well beyond Saturday because this year’s high-stakes game would be seen as settling — for a while at least — the eternal conflict as to which school is superior.

“Everyone’s version of reality is on the line here. Whoever wins doesn’t just win the argument of who is the better team, but they win a grander argument about who deserves to be viewed as the predominant power,” Mr. St. John said. “It’s more than just who is the better team this year. It’s whose story is right.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Close the Store, It’s the Year’s Big Game in Alabama. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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