EUGENE, Oregon — College football is ultimately just one big trophy case. Every lobby of every team facility greets visitors with awards and placards of all sorts, be they crystal footballs, actual bowls from bowl game victories or old oaken buckets and brass spittoons.

But on Saturday (3 p.m. ET), when Oregon and Oregon State square off in Eugene, there will be no official postgame award exchange. No reluctant turning over of a rusty memento from years gone by with some elaborate sort-of-true backstory. Not even some modern corporate-sponsored Lucite or aluminum monstrosity.

That makes no sense. Not for a game that is being played for the 129th time, the most of any rivalry in the western half of the country and the fifth most all time in the entire FBS. Ducks vs. Beavers has history, stars, drama, all of it. It just doesn’t have a trophy.

Or does it?

The answer is yes. Well, partially yes. There is a trophy. It is not officially official, but it is officially real. And its relatively new realness reveals one of those elaborate trophy backstories that is totally true, though it sounds totally made up. Just like the animal it emulates. The one any visitor to the University of Oregon’s alumni relations office can see for themselves.

It’s the Platypus Trophy, and precisely like its namesake, it has spent the past 66 years stealthily burrowing its way in and out of obscurity along the 44 miles that separate Corvallis and Eugene. And, like any real platypus, it even found its way into the water.

“It’s a weird animal. It’s weird. It doesn’t actually come from a duck and a beaver, but it sure looks like it does,” explains Raphe Beck, executive director of the University of Oregon Alumni Association and current keeper of the trophy. “I’m no zoologist, but my understanding is it’s just this weird mishmash animal. Also, it’s only in Australia, so it’s sort of a funny thing for Oregonians to adopt.”

“Of course we adopted it,” adds John Valva, Beck’s Oregon State counterpart. “It’s weird, and Oregonians love to embrace their own weirdness, so it’s a great fit. I just don’t think those people know about this trophy like they should.”

In 2004, no one knew about it at all. That November, in the days leading up to the game formerly known as the Civil War, a question was asked that flushed our shy duckbilled friend out into the open, presented in The Oregonian by John Canzano, the sportswriter laureate of the Beaver State.

“Like, where’s the trophy? Somebody forgot something. This game needs a trophy. That’s a low-hanging fruit column,” the writer and radio host confesses. “So, immediately after I file the column, an email pops up from a man named Warren Spady. ‘Hey, there is a trophy. I sculpted it.'”

“Well, first of all, I don’t think of myself as an artist. I think of myself as a sculptor. It’s different. It’s a manly thing,” Spady says, laughing in his living room near Carlton, Oregon. Today, he is an 89-year-old retiree, a former longtime art teacher, sitting in a living room that is decorated with his sculptures. In the fall of 1959, he was an Oregon undergrad art student.

“The idea was not mine,” he remembers. “The idea was developed by two administrators, one from the University of Oregon and the other from Oregon State College, which didn’t become a university until a year later. I think they’d had a lot of beer.

“But anyway, they came up discussing ideas for something, you know, for a trophy, because, you know, all the other teams had one. So somehow, during one of these meetings, they came up with a platypus.”

They approached several graduate students to bring their idea to artistic life, but they all passed. So the task fell to undergrad Spady. He chose Oregon maple as his medium and went to work, seven days a week for a month, right up to kickoff of the big game. That led to an artistic decision.

“I wasn’t going to have enough time to do its feet, so I decided to put the platypus in mud. And if I had time, I’ll clean that mud off the feet,” he recalls thinking. “We were a touchdown favorite in that 1959 game, but I never had a chance to fix it because they lost. The trophy went to Oregon State. Then they won it again in 1960.” (Actually, that game ended in a 14-14 tie.) “Then I left school. So, he’s still in the mud.”

He is, after all, a platypus. OK, let’s call it an impressionistic interpretation of a platypus, with very little when it comes to features but very much when it comes to being a smooth, boomerang-like piece of wood with four legs, no feet and a head that looks an awful lot like its tail.

The pale maple mammal is mounted atop a wooden pedestal that is adorned with a brass plate decorated with the logos of Oregon and Oregon State, separated by the words: “RIVALRY GAME PLATYPUS TROPHY.” However, that is not the only plaque. There is a smaller one fastened to the short side of the base, reading “Exchanged between the OU and OSU Alumni Associations. Reinstated at the 111th Rivalry Game, December 7, 2007.”

But wait, there’s a third sign, too. Hidden on the opposite side of the first but just as large. It also has the school crests, but they are divided by the words: “PLATYPUS WATER POLO CHAMPION.”

Huh?

The Platypus Trophy has been stolen more times than Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece. Oregon students, presumably angry over their upset loss, stole the trophy from Corvallis in 1959. Over the next several years, it was lifted and moved multiple times, ultimately vanishing for good after only three years of being awarded following the football game.

In 1986, Spady, at this time an art teacher in Eugene, was walking through the university aquatic center when he spotted his long-lost trophy behind glass. As it turned out, the Oregon water polo team had happened upon it, and during the mid-1960s made it its own personal web-footed pat on the back for winning four consecutive meets against State.

Spady was in a hurry that day and hustled past the trophy, vowing to return and “fix it up.” But there were also plans to fix up the aquatic center, and when it was torn down, the trophy was presumed lost.

Then came Canzano’s column … and Spady’s email … and Canzano’s follow-up story … and a renewed hunt for the platypus. It was literally a door-to-door search, led by Dan Williams, an Oregon administrator who in 1961 was the Oregon student body president tasked with handing the trophy over to the Oregon State student body president. It was finally found in a closet at Oregon’s McArthur Court, the basketball arena located next to, yes, the school’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History.

Rescued and cleaned up, the trophy was presented to the schools’ athletic administrators as a candidate for official game reward status, but they declined. “I think they thought it was too weird looking?” Spady surmises.

So ownership and postgame trading duties were handed over to the alumni associations, who happily volunteered for the gig.

“We’re lucky that our schools have two animals that could combine like that,” Beck says. “I don’t think there are a lot of college football rivalries that have mascots you can combine. You have the front end of a duck and the back end of the beaver.”

Responds Valva to being the, ahem, butt of a joke: “They would think that way. But in Beaver Land, that back half has a tail that you don’t want to mess with.”

That’s true, a fact verified by Kathryn Everson, a professor at Oregon State’s Department of Integrative Biology and a specialist in animal hybridization. “The Latin name for it is ornithorhynchus, which means bird-nosed, and then anatinus, which is duck-like. It has a bill that looks a lot like a duck, but actually if you touch it, it’s a little more fleshy. It kind of feels like suede to the touch.”

She explains the bill is packed with electro-sensory organs. When looking for food, a platypus will close its eyes and let the bill do the work.

“It also has webbed feet. It has a very beaver-like tail covered in fur,” she adds. “But unlike a duck and a beaver, the platypus is venomous. It actually has a spur on its back, feet that are hollow, that can inject venom. So, there you go.”

There you go, indeed. An animal not to be messed with, especially after decades of safely hiding and now, possibly, to be showcased in front of tens of thousands of college football fans. Maybe.

As far as anyone can recall, “Platy” as Valva and Beck lovingly call the trophy, has not been inside Oregon State’s Reser Stadium since 1960, if that happened at all. It has most definitely never darkened the doors of Oregon’s massive space age green and gold Nike-built football facility. That was obvious as soon as OU head coach Dan Lanning was shown a photo of the trophy this Tuesday. He said it was the first time in his four years as lead Duck he had laid eyes on it.

“It’s an interesting-looking trophy,” said the coach of the nation’s sixth-ranked team. “But I’ll tell you one thing, we want to win it.”

If his Ducks do win it (as of Thursday night they were a 34.5-point favorite), they in theory could become the first Oregon team to carry the Platypus Trophy off the field. But they won’t do that. They never do that. Because the trophy is still not officially recognized by either school. There doesn’t appear to be any reason to believe that will ever happen, which seems to be just fine with the alumni associations but is puzzling to Spady and his former classmates who remember when it was the recognized reward for winning the game, as short-lived as that might have been.

At the moment, Oregon-Oregon State, like a platypus, is difficult to define. Next year the game won’t be played for the first time since World War II. Even as current athletic administrators have expressed their dedication to its return, many in Eugene and Corvallis fear for the rivalry’s future.

It no longer has its old nickname. It no longer has its old conference, the Pac-12. Perhaps what it needs is an old trophy.

“It’s a Duck and a Beaver. It’s middle ground,” Canzano says, still hoping his Indiana Jones find achieves official status. “People here, they love and they live. It’s the perfect symbol.”

But for now, as this rivalry waddles into its uncertain future, college football fans must keep their eyes open — or close them and use their electrical beaks — to spot two alumni directors and their subtle postgame exchange. Sitting in a bar somewhere between their two campuses, just like the men who first conjured up the trophy idea so many years ago.

“Oh, there is no ceremony,” Valva says, chuckling. “There is no champagne that goes with Platy. Platy is a couple of us with a couple of beers and we hand it over and say, see you next year.”

Adds Beck: “We drive it on the I-5 and drop it off. Strapped into the backseat.”

Of what?

“A Subaru, like all Oregonians.”

LOS ANGELES — It was the middle of June, the San Diego Padres were in town for what promised to be a heated series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Joe Musgrove, their injured ace, had one thing on his mind:

Securing a signed Clayton Kershaw jersey.

Major league players often send each other jerseys for personalization, to commemorate friendship or admiration or even milestones. But Musgrove had done that only a handful of times in his nine years as a major leaguer — all for former teammates he was once close with, never for a prominent member of the Padres’ biggest rival.

“This is the first that I’ve sent one over in admiration for what someone has done for the game,” said Musgrove, who grew up a Padres fan before ultimately pitching for the club. “I know he’s flooded with them now, and it might seem like a lot, but he’s made a big impact on this game — not only as a player, but for the way he handles himself.”

Kershaw will make his final regular-season start at Dodger Stadium on Friday, in what we now know will be one of the last appearances of his career. But even before the news of his impending retirement became official Thursday, the likelihood of it was high enough for Major League Baseball to extend him a special invitation to this year’s All-Star Game. And for a number of opposing players to seek opportunities to pay respect in their own way, whether it’s offering praise, expressing gratitude or, often, seeking autographs.

Kershaw, 37, has noticed that jersey requests have “slightly increased from years past” but stressed it’s “nothing crazy.” Sometimes a home series will go by and nobody will ask. Others, he’ll be flooded with them. “It’s like they all talk,” Kershaw said. He signs them all, either by listing his accomplishments — 3X NL Cy Young, 2014 NL MVP, 2X WS Champ! as he wrote on one for Colorado Rockies starter Kyle Freeland — or scribbling a brief message. In his mind, it wasn’t long ago that he was on the other side.

“It’s amazing how fast that flips, you know?” Kershaw told ESPN last week. “You don’t think that you’re the old guy until it happens, and then you are. It happens fast.”

WHEN KERSHAW SIGNED his fourth consecutive one-year contract with the Dodgers in March, he was considered a luxury. Blake Snell and Roki Sasaki had already been added. Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow were coming back healthy. Shohei Ohtani was on track to return as a two-way player. The likes of Emmet Sheehan, Tony Gonsolin and Dustin May were next in line.

But when Kershaw rejoined the rotation in the middle of May, in the wake of offseason knee and toe surgeries, he helped stabilize a staff that had once again absorbed an avalanche of injuries. In August, as the Dodgers’ rotation began to round into form, he found another level, winning all five of his starts while posting a 1.88 ERA. Kershaw is throwing the slowest fastball of his career, offsetting it with a slider that oftentimes lacks its traditional bite and resorting to more inventiveness than ever, even with the occasional eephus pitch. And yet his record is 10-2 and his ERA is 3.53.

“He’s making jokes about how he’s only throwing 86, 87 — and he’s still getting outs,” San Francisco Giants starter Logan Webb said. “To me that’s the most impressive thing.”

Webb was a 12-year-old in Northern California when Kershaw made his major league debut. His high school years coincided with a four-year stretch from 2011 to 2014 that saw Kershaw claim three Cy Young Awards and an MVP, accumulate 72 regular-season victories, tally 895⅓ innings and establish himself as one of the greatest of his era. Competing against him, as a fellow frontline starter on a division rival, hasn’t taken any of the shine away.

Said Webb: “He seems to amaze me every single time.”

Two months ago, Webb shared an All-Star team with Kershaw for the first time and was adamant about securing a jersey from him, even though, he said, “I usually feel awful asking guys.” On Friday, Webb will watch from the opposite dugout as Kershaw makes what might be the final Dodger Stadium appearance of his career, depending on how he factors into L.A.’s October plans.

The Dodgers boast a six-man rotation at the moment, and two of those members, Yamamoto and Snell, are basically guaranteed to start in a best-of-three wild-card series. The third spot would go to Ohtani, unless the Dodgers surprise outsiders by deploying him as a reliever. Then there’s Glasnow, who was lavished with a $130 million-plus extension to take down important starts, and Sheehan, a promising right-hander who has been effective out of the bullpen.

Kershaw wasn’t healthy enough to contribute to last year’s championship run and wants nothing more than to help with this one. But he’s also realistic.

“We’ll see,” Kershaw said. “We’ll see what happens. My job is just to pitch well. Whatever decision they make, or if I get to make a start or do whatever — they’re going to make the best decision for the team. I’ll understand either way. Obviously making it hard for them is what I want to do.”

Dodgers manager Dave Roberts doesn’t know what role Kershaw might play on a postseason roster, but he said “there’s a place for him” on it.

“The bottom line is I trust him,” Roberts said. “And for me, the postseason is about players you trust.”

ANDREW ABBOTT SAT alongside Cincinnati Reds teammate Chase Burns in Dodger Stadium’s first-base dugout on Aug. 26 and couldn’t understand what he was seeing.

“Is that a changeup?” he asked.

Kershaw famously doesn’t throw many changeups, largely because he has never been confident in his ability to do so. But suddenly Abbott was watching him uncork a pitch that traveled in the low 80s and faded away from opposing right-handed hitters, the continuation of a split-change he began to incorporate a couple years ago. To Abbott, it spoke to the ingenuity that has extended Kershaw’s effectiveness.

“He knows what he’s doing,” Abbott said. “He can just figure things out on the fly.”

The Reds’ third-year starting pitcher had shared a clubhouse with Kershaw for the first time during the All-Star Game in Atlanta this summer. He wanted so badly to pick his brain about pitch sequencing, but he also didn’t want to waste Kershaw’s time; he made small talk about their Dallas ties and left it at that.

Six weeks later, when the Reds visited Dodger Stadium, Abbott made it a point to provide a visiting clubhouse attendant with a Kershaw jersey to be sent to the other side for a signature. He already had one of Christian Yelich, who represented his first strikeout; Edwin Diaz, the brother of his former teammate, Alexis; Joey Votto, a Reds legend; and Aaron Judge, arguably the best hitter on the planet. Abbott initially didn’t want to bother Kershaw, worried that he might just be adding to an overwhelming pile, but he couldn’t run the risk of missing what might be his final opportunity.

“I watched Kersh since I was a kid,” Abbott said. “I mean, I was 9 when he debuted. I just like to have guys that I’ve watched and I’ve kind of idolized. Those are the ones I go after. It’s cool that you’re in the job with him, too.”

After spending the past four years pitching for two of their biggest rivals — first the Padres, then the Giants — Snell signed a five-year, $182 million contract with the Dodgers over the offseason and told president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman that he wanted his locker next to Kershaw’s. Snell’s locker neighbored Kershaw’s in spring training, and he now resides just two lockers down inside Dodger Stadium’s newly renovated home clubhouse.

As a fellow left-hander, Snell has tried to soak up as much as he can from watching Kershaw, specifically how he utilizes his slider. He has learned, though, that a lot of his success is driven by his mindset.

“He never gives in,” Snell said. “He’s a competitor. And you can’t, like, train that or teach that. You either have it or you don’t. And he’s very elite at competing. The game comes, and he’s the best version of himself.”

Snell arrived in the major leagues as a 23-year-old former first-round pick. But he did not believe he would stay very long, so he made it a point to gather as many personalized jerseys as he could. He already has two framed Kershaw jerseys hanging on an office wall littered with other sports memorabilia, but the end of his first year with the Dodgers has left him wondering if he has enough.

Said Snell: “I might get me another one.”

TO THOSE WHO have observed Kershaw throughout his career, the thought that he would even allow himself to be mic’d up while pitching in a game — let alone revel in it — stood as a clear indication that this would probably be it. Roberts, who managed the National League All-Stars earlier this summer, noticed a more reflective, appreciative side to Kershaw even before he took the mound for his 11th Midsummer Classic.

Roberts noticed it when Kershaw addressed his NL teammates before the game, reminding them this was an opportunity to honor those who got them there. He noticed it 13 days before that, on the night of July 2, when Kershaw finished a six-inning outing with the 3,000th strikeout of his career and spilled onto the field to acknowledge the fans. Most of all, he’s noticed it through the ease with which Kershaw seems to carry himself this season. “The edges,” Roberts said, “aren’t as hard anymore.”

“He knows he’s had a tremendous career, and I think that now he’s making it a point. He’s being intentional about taking in every moment.”

Kershaw allowed himself to savor his 3,000th strikeout — a milestone only 19 other pitchers have reached — and made a conscious effort to take in every moment at this year’s All-Star Game. His wife, Ellen, and their four children have made it a point to travel for every one of his starts this season, even when Texas schools re-started earlier this month, adding a layer of sentimentality to the stretch run of his season.

But for as much as Kershaw would like to soak in every inning remaining in his major league career, he can’t. The season keeps going, the stakes keep ratcheting up, and Kershaw believes in the link between dismissing success and maintaining an edge. “The minute you savor, the minute you think about success, you’re content,” he said. But that also means he can’t truly enjoy the end.

There’s a cruelty in that.

“Yeah,” Kershaw said, “but that’s OK. Because you want to go out competing, just like you always did. At the end of the day, being healthy, being able to compete and pitch well, being on a great team — that’s all you can ask for. If you do all of the other stuff, you become content or satisfied or whatever it is. Then it’s all downhill.”

ESPN’s Jesse Rogers contributed to this report.

CINCINNATI — Cincinnati Reds right-hander Hunter Greene had thrown 93 pitches and given up just one hit through eight innings Thursday night. He wanted the ball in the ninth and manager Terry Francona wasn’t going to deny him this time.

Greene got the final three outs for his first career nine-inning shutout as the Reds beat the Chicago Cubs 1-0 to keep pace with the New York Mets for the third NL wild-card spot.

On April 7 at San Francisco, Greene retired the first two batters in the ninth with the Reds leading 2-0. After he allowed a single and a walk, Francona brought on Tony Santillan to get the final out. Greene finished with 104 pitches.

“San Francisco flashed kind of through my mind,” Greene said. “I was telling myself, ‘This is my game’. I told [manager Terry Francona] that next game that I pitched deep into that situation, I wanted to finish it.”

Francona didn’t budge from his dugout chair on Thursday night.

“I didn’t want to try,” the Reds skipper said. “We didn’t even have anyone throwing in the bullpen.”

Greene’s 107th pitch of the night registered 101.5 mph for strike two to Ian Happ, who fanned on five pitches for the final out. Greene had nine strikeouts and one walk. He threw 109 pitches.

Greene retired the first 12 batters until Moises Ballesteros reached on a fielding error to begin the fifth. He didn’t allow a hit until Seiya Suzuki‘s two-out double in the seventh.

“The thing that sticks out is that it was 1-0,” Francona said. “There was no wiggle room. Coming off the other day in Sacramento, to back that up the way he did was really impressive.”

In Greene’s last outing on Saturday against the A’s, he allowed five runs and two home runs and pitched a season-low 2⅓ innings. With the Reds trying to remain in the playoff chase, Greene responded.

“The last game doesn’t define me,” he said. “There are a lot of ups and downs in this sport. I’ve been able to overcome a lot of those over the years.”

Cubs starter Colin Rea matched Greene early but allowed a leadoff double by Austin Hays in the fourth. Hays scored on Will Benson‘s double to drive in the game’s only run. Rea had a career-high 11 strikeouts, but it was Greene’s night.

“We were kind of going back and forth and we were having quick innings,” Rea said. “He’s elite. We know how good he is. He threw his hardest pitch in the ninth inning. That’s special.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.