TWENTY-FOUR YEARS ago, Delaware was rolling over New Hampshire, leading 31-3 late in the third quarter. The second-ranked Blue Hens were a perennial Football Championship Subdivision power. But UNH had something Delaware didn’t: Ryan Day and Chip Kelly. Two of the game’s most innovative offensive minds, who, even then, had an inherent trust in each other, molded from their Manchester roots.

Long before he became Ohio State’s head coach, Day quarterbacked one of the biggest comebacks in college football history. Kelly, then UNH’s offensive coordinator, kept dialing up creative passing plays, and Day kept completing throws. Then, on a fourth-and-19, Kelly called “Charlotte Angle.” Day hit Brian Mallette on a slant, and Mallette flipped the ball to a receiver sprinting the opposite direction for a touchdown, tying the game. In overtime, Day found Mallette again on his school-record 65th passing attempt on a wheel route, giving the Wildcats a stunning 45-44 victory.

On the victory bus, Day called his buddies back home. They didn’t even realize UNH had won. They had turned the TV off by the third quarter.

Today, Day and Kelly are together again.

They reunited this offseason when Day relinquished playcalling and convinced Kelly to leave his post as UCLA’s head coach and become Ohio State’s offensive coordinator.

On Saturday, in a Big Ten showdown, their second-ranked Buckeyes travel to No. 3 Oregon, where more than a decade ago, as Day put it, Kelly made his name “revolutionizing” offense.

Now on the same side again, they’re hoping to capture their elusive first national championship.

“We’ve been around each other for so long that we share a lot of the same views of how the game is supposed to look,” Kelly said. “That makes it so much easier. … It’s been great.”

Though he’s now the boss, Day is 15 years younger than Kelly. Still, the two have a unique bond forged by a shared history and shared experience growing up in Manchester, where they played sports for the same youth coaches, attended the same high school, played quarterback for the same college and later coached on the same staff there.

“Probably the biggest influence in my life in football,” Day said of Kelly. “From my hometown. … He was the first one to really get into college coaching and then he recruited me. I shared with him then that I wanted to be a coach and then he kind of took me under his wing. … Kind of gave me my start.”

That came in Manchester — New Hampshire’s biggest city, with a population just a bit larger than the capacity at the Horseshoe. It’s where Kelly and Day discovered a common calling coaching football.

AS A TEENAGER, Chip Kelly seemed to thrive in just about anything he tried. The Manchester High School Central Class of 1981 yearbook named Kelly its “most athletic” and “best looking” student.

The son of a local attorney, Kelly was quarterback captain of the football team, a star ice hockey player and a state champion in track, running the second leg of the 4×100-meter relay team. Frank Kelley, one of Kelly’s football teammates and who ran the first leg on that relay team, remembered taking Kelly water skiing for the first time on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire’s largest lake.

“Usually people who’ve never water-skied before, they’re not up there for very long,” Kelley said. “He’s water skiing and the guys are getting pissed off because he’s not falling. So we start throwing stuff at him, life preservers. … He was just a natural at a lot of the stuff he did.”

Kelly attended Central in its heyday, when enrollment was among the largest in New England. The public school blended students from all parts of Manchester, including the affluent north end, the middle class on the east side and the inner city.

“You had friends from all walks of life. … it was wonderful,” said Selma Naccach-Hoff, who has taught at Central for 40 years and had Kelly in a mythology class. “It’s a nurturing place.”

Kelly was a senior when Central’s most famous future alum — actor and comedian Adam Sandler — was a freshman. One of Frank Kelley’s sisters was Sandler’s bar mitzvah date when he turned 13. Sandler, Kelly and Day have all been inducted into the Central Hall of Fame. Sandler has given the Central commencement address several times over the years, especially when he has had a niece or nephew graduate.

Central, however, hadn’t had a winning football team in years until Kelly came through the program. Bob Leonard took over as Central’s head football coach, just before Kelly’s freshman year. As a sophomore, Kelly took over as starting quarterback.

“He was a coach when he was a kid,” said Leonard, who also coached Kelly in track. “He understood what we were doing, and he always wanted to know more about what we were doing.”

Kelly didn’t live far from Leonard, who was then in his 20s and lived with the other coaches. On Sunday afternoons, Kelly and some of his teammates would walk or bike to Leonard’s house to watch film in the living room. Leonard would hang a sheet over the fireplace, serving as the screen for the 16-millimeter projector.

If Leonard’s players were out on the town, he didn’t worry — as long as Kelly was with them.

“He was a good leader,” Leonard said, “and the group of kids he played with, they were good kids, they hung together and stuck together.”

Kelly led them on the field, too. Leonard gradually gave Kelly freedom to call the plays he wanted out of their I-formation, bootleg offense.

“If he looked at me and his eyes said, ‘I know what I want to do,'” Leonard recalled, “I’d tell him, ‘Go with it.'”

Kelly also played deep safety defensively, and, as Leonard noted, “was there to clean up the mess” if any of his teammates got beat.

“He didn’t scream and yell,” Leonard said. “He always had a big smile — ‘Let’s go and do this.'”

The Little Green won as many games as they lost, a big step forward from where they had been. Leonard noted that Kelly and his class “left a legacy” and a foundation for players who would come later, including Day and his younger brother, Timmy, who would go to play quarterback for UMass.

Leonard resigned from Central after Kelly’s final game to get married (Kelly attended the wedding) but later returned to coach defense under Jim Schubert, who remained Central’s head coach for 16 years through Day’s career.

After graduating from UNH, Kelly also came back to Central on Schubert’s staff, running the offense for a season. Kelly began experimenting with a fast-paced tempo that would later change football. That came with growing pains and, at times, exasperated his former coach.

“There’s a picture somewhere with my arms around his neck on the sideline,” Leonard said, laughing, “I say, ‘You go three-and-out again, I’m going to kill you right here because the defense can’t stand this anymore.’ But it was fun watching the offense. He had free reign. That’s where it all started. And we had a lot of fun that year.”

SELMA NACCACH-HOFF never had Ryan Day in class. But she had Day’s future wife, Nina Spirou, and her twin sister in world literature, an advanced placement course.

“So I did see a lot of Ryan,” Naccach-Hoff said. “They were a cute couple, really. His rosy cheeks distinguished him back then, and they still do now. It’s really quite fun to see.”

Naccach-Hoff remembered Day being sweet, “almost embarrassingly so,” to Spirou and his teachers and other classmates.

“You got a sense of Ryan’s character,” Naccach-Hoff said. “Supportive, kind, doing the right thing.”

Day has spoken out about his father, who died by suicide when Day was just 8 years old. He would say that loss gave him an “edge” on the field. But the family tragedy also put the onus on Day to help his mother raise his two younger brothers, Chris and Tim.

“He kind of became the father in a way to them,” said Mike Murphy, who coached Day in Pop Warner football. “He became a little more mature. And he played that way, too.”

Murphy’s son, Matt, one of Day’s friends growing up, remembered how Day always seemed older than other kids their age.

“A lot of things in some ways were beneath him,” said Matt, now a middle school teacher in Manchester. “Like, ‘You guys are going to go egging houses? That’s not really my thing.’ He was not interested. Like, ‘I’m not going to let people down. I’m going to do the right thing.'”

Following in Kelly’s footsteps, Day developed into a star athlete. He played point guard in basketball, was a standout catcher in baseball and became a three-year starting quarterback.

“Leadership was not in question when you talked about Ryan Day — he always stood out that way,” said Schubert, who had also played quarterback at Central. “I don’t think he ever criticized another player the entire time he played for me. His teammates followed him in every sport. Great character, great individual.”

The team had a motto going into Day’s junior year: “Believe and achieve.” The players wore that phrase on the back of their team T-shirts during offseason lifting and conditioning. Before the season, Day and Murphy found a piece of plywood and painted it green and white, the school’s colors. On it, they wrote, “If you believe, you will achieve today.” Mimicking the sign from Oklahoma and Notre Dame, “Play Like a Champion Today,” Day and Murphy hung up theirs on the wall right outside the Little Green locker room. The players would slap the sign before their home games while taking the field.

“Maybe it was kind of dorky,” Murphy said, “but we thought it was cool.”

That season, Central advanced all the way to the 1995 state championship game against Merrimack. The Little Green fell behind early.

“We were struggling,” Schubert said. “He brought the team together during a timeout. Ryan said, ‘Look, let’s get this together, men.'”

Led by Day’s arm, Central roared back to win by 17 points for its first state title in 25 years. Down the road as an assistant for UNH, Kelly was paying attention, salivating at the opportunity to recruit Day to the Wildcats.

SEAN McDONNELL WAS coaching receivers for Boston University in the 1980s when he received a call from a player he’d once coached against in Manchester.

Chip Kelly was still an assistant at Central but was hoping to move to college. He knew McDonnell was from Manchester and wondered whether he could come up to Boston and talk offense. McDonnell figured they’d chat for a few minutes. Instead, the two exchanged ideas on the chalkboard for several hours.

McDonnell was so impressed that when he ended up at Columbia, he told then-Lions head coach Ray Tellier that he should interview Kelly. After the interview, Tellier told McDonnell, “We’ve got to turn this interview into a recruiting session. He’s good, I really like him.”

Kelly joined the staff at Columbia, then followed McDonnell to UNH. In 1999, when McDonnell was promoted to head coach, Kelly became his offensive coordinator. One of their first moves was naming Ryan Day the starting quarterback.

“We were at the incubator stages of us starting to do some creative things on offense,” McDonnell said. “Then we had Ryan, just an unbelievable sponge with Chip. … And besides being a great player, his leadership abilities were tremendous. Those guys would run through a wall for Ryan. It was a pretty cool thing to see.”

McDonnell recalled even then Day and Kelly working well together executing game plans. And game-to-game those plans could change. One week, Kelly would implement the speed option and run the ball every down. The following week, the Wildcats would spread the field and pass it almost exclusively. McDonnell said the endless series of wrinkles kept practice fun while keeping opposing defenses guessing. But whatever the Wildcats did then, they went fast.

Day’s ability to lead and adapt made it all work.

“There was so much innovation happening then,” Mallette said. “And Ryan was the kind of leader, you just looked at him in the huddle and his eyes and just saw how determined he was going to be in whatever situation that was coming. … He was such a fierce competitor.”

That was on display in one of the biggest victories of Day’s career. In 2001, UNH trailed in-state rival Dartmouth 38-35 with under 2 minutes left. The Wildcats had blown a 21-point lead in the second half and seemed destined for a gut-wrenching loss. Mallette recalled the Ivy League students chanting “safety school” thinking the win was all but in the bag.

But then Day drove UNH down the field. With only a few seconds remaining, he rolled right. As he was about to get pummeled, Day lofted a pass toward Mallette at the back of the end zone for the winning 24-yard score.

“Ryan was the same [then] as he is now,” Kelly said. “Very well prepared, knew what he was facing. … You knew [then] that guy has it.”

As others had seen a future coaching star in Kelly coming up, Kelly saw the same potential in Day. Kelly brought Day on the offensive staff at UNH in 2002. Then in 2005, Kelly called another Manchester native in Dan Mullen, who was offensive coordinator at Florida under Urban Meyer. Mullen hired Day as a graduate assistant.

In 2017, after stints under Kelly with the Eagles and 49ers, Day joined Meyer’s staff at Ohio State.

“I’ve been very fortunate to be around great coaches and great mentors,” Day said. “And [Kelly] was obviously a big part of that.”

SEAN McDONNELL TRAVELED to Columbus last month to watch Ohio State defeat Marshall 49-14. He spent time with Ryan Day on Friday night, watching Day’s son play high school football. After the Buckeyes won Saturday, McDonnell hung out at Chip Kelly’s house with Day. While talking football like old times, they all watched Michigan knock off USC that evening together.

“It’s good to see both of those guys in a position where they feel very comfortable,” McDonnell said. “Chip’s having a ball coaching the offense. I think Ryan’s able to do some head-coaching things. … By not having to call the plays and be so involved in the offense, he’s in a very good place, from my observation.”

McDonnell came away from his visit believing this could be a special season for the Buckeyes. He noted the trust the two had at Manchester seems as strong as ever. Day used that same word this week when reflecting on his relationship with Kelly all these years later.

“When you have trust, you can get through a lot,” Day said. “Because you can be direct with somebody and know that you care about him, and no matter what is said, you can put your arm around each other afterwards.”

SALT LAKE CITY — Screens are everywhere inside Delta Center. At one point a few of those screens, along with the rich voice of the building’s public address announcer, issue a message to fans.

“We remind you to drink responsibly,” is the message, and it’s a rather common one delivered by teams throughout professional sports.

But then, the in-arena cameras immediately cut to a fan holding a beer. With an orange-red beard and dressed in Carhartt T-shirt, the fan promptly starts chugging and the crowd erupts as each ounce goes down. The cameras then cut to another person. And another person. And another person.

The “Celly cam” and its instant popularity produced two of the memorable moments in a night that saw the Utah Hockey Club win its first-ever game. The first was when the entire Delta Center crowd booed someone because they couldn’t chug half of their beer. The second was when the arena was brought to its collective feet because another person poured their cup of beer into their Retro Jordan 1s and guzzled it down like they were Daniel Ricciardo after winning a Formula 1 race.

“We love it! We love the Celly cam!” said Christian Priskos, a lifelong Salt Lake City resident whose friends smile and nod in agreement. “We’ve never seen that at a Jazz game! This is a first in Utah history right here! Seriously, I’ve never seen a Celly cam at any Utah sports or anything in any sort of capacity at all. To have the hockey game, the first one, sets a precedent.”

Utah’s players noticed a difference too.

“That was pretty cool,” said forward Dylan Guenther, who scored the first goal in franchise history. “That building was special. That was a ton of fun. A lot of fun to play in front of that crowd.”

Goal horns. Goal songs. The pregame introductions. The breakout chants. The mascot. And the in-game highlights of thousands of people celebrating how someone drinks a beer. These are how an NHL team and its fans foster an identity.

After deciding in June that the team’s name for Year 1 would be “Utah Hockey Club” (with no nickname), Tuesday was the first official step in the team’s path toward creating something the franchise can call its own. Architects of this process often share how developing an environment takes time to perfect, while also admitting it can take years to craft a presentation that will never be perfect.

After an abrupt sale, and subsequent move from Arizona, the Utah Hockey Club had four months to figure out how to create an in-game experience that was unique, memorable and specific to its fans. They also had to create an entirely new identity, because the former owners of the Coyotes retained the name and intellectual property of that franchise.

The team did it with the hope that the big surprise it spent countless hours curating would be a big hit.

Although much of the UHC’s game operations staff has experience doing this for the NBA’s Utah Jazz, they still needed to figure out how their game experience would be different from a Jazz game. They had to create and execute ideas that they hoped would work — with the knowledge that their plans could also fall flat on the most important night in franchise history.

Above all, they had to cultivate an experience that felt like both a hockey game and a Utah-specific event.

“It’s been a challenge, but we’ve had unbelievable collaboration,” Utah president of hockey operations Chris Armstrong said. “We’ve had good collaboration internally and had some great agency partners that have helped us accelerate our output with the timelines we’ve had.”

LAMONT BUFORD IS the vice president of entertainment experience and production for the Seattle Kraken. Eric Schulz is a senior lecturer at Utah State University, who once oversaw the Jazz’s marketing department. Together, they provide the context necessary to understand what was at stake for the Utah Hockey Club.

Buford, who has worked for the St. Louis Blues and the Arizona Coyotes, was part of the team that developed the Kraken’s in-game experience. The Kraken had nearly two years to create something ahead of their opening night. They used their time to observe crowd dynamics at other Seattle sporting events. They also had one employee who was dedicated to studying the nautical history of Seattle, given the team’s name and how it is part of the city’s sports fabric.

As Buford points out, the UHC didn’t have that runway — which only adds to what is an already high degree of difficulty.

“You have to think about every little thing, every little detail,” Buford said. “You talk about the goal horn, then you have to think about the goal song. You’re thinking about those other small nuances for a power play or a penalty kill. What’s that thing that might be a tradition somewhere else, and is it something you can bring over? Or what is your tradition?”

Buford and those who operate in the field of in-game operations often refer to everything from the arena to the PA announcer’s voice as a character. They view the game experience as a show, and as with all shows, there are characters who can make or break a production.

The challenge that comes with having characters is knowing when to use them, how to use them or if you even need them. Buford cited having a mascot as an example. He said that a mascot is one of the primary ways a team interacts with its fans because players cannot be everywhere.

“It’s putting together all of that stuff and asking, ‘What is Salt Lake City known for?'” Buford said. “‘Are they a music city? What are they?’ You have to figure out what that is and does that fit within the mold of what you’re trying to put forth. Sports and entertainment has changed so much over the years. It’s evolved that it’s not just about the product on the ice. The product on the ice is very important, but how you’re entertaining people and grabbing their attention is even more important.”

Schulz explained what the in-game presentation landscape has historically looked like in Salt Lake City. He said it started 30 years ago when Grant Harrison, who was the VP of game operations for the Jazz, was among the first to lay the foundation for many elements now routinely seen throughout sports.

Harrison and the Jazz did everything from indoor fireworks to being among the first teams to use indoor blimps to drop tickets on fans to hosting cow-milking contests at halftime. They also created Jazz Bear, who is one of the seven NBA mascots to have been inducted into the Mascot Hall of Fame.

Jazz Bear ultimately paved the way for fans across Utah to have high expectations for their mascots. That continues today with Cosmo the Cougar, BYU’s anthropomorphic mascot who has gone viral for smoothly pulling off everything from hip-hop dance routines to jumps through flaming hoops.

“Grant’s philosophy was you can’t control wins and losses on the court and some nights are going to be stinkers,” Schulz said. “If we can entertain people and it doesn’t matter what the final score is, they’re going to be happy.”

ARMSTRONG SAID THE UHC wants to create an environment that’s respected by fans. Doing that meant it needed to address concerns about Delta Center’s obstructed seats.

As a basketball-first building, Delta Center’s setup for hockey includes seats behind each goal that are obstructed to the point that fans can see only the goal on the far end because of the steep angles.

Chris Barney, the Smith Entertainment Group’s president of revenue and commercial strategy, said that the UHC has taken a transparent approach. Any fan who purchases one of those tickets receives a form acknowledging that the seat they’re about to buy comes with an altered view.

“Transparency through this whole thing was really important to us,” Barney said. “Lessons were learned from talking to other hockey clubs that had been in NBA buildings in the past. … It’s also the other end of the stick in that we are trying to develop a fan base and acclimate people to hockey and get them excited to support the team.”

A day after the first game, the team issued a statement that it drew 16,020 fans to Delta Center by “leveraging the use of single-goal view seating to welcome more guests to watch the game live beyond the arena’s typical hockey capacity of 11,131.”

That’s what makes relying on the characters Buford referenced so crucial. And for any team, the arena it plays in might be the biggest character of all.

That was even more evident with Delta Center’s interior signage, which appeared to be more extensive than what most NHL arenas have. There were scoreboard screens tucked in the highest corners of the building, as well as smaller scoreboards closer to ice level, a detail that’s associated with NBA teams.

Delta Center has a four-sided videoboard above center ice. It also has four smaller videoboards within the larger videoboard, in addition to an LED ribbon above the main one. That’s how the UHC is able to create an immersive environment, such as when the team took the ice for the first time.

As the lights dimmed, all of the LED scoreboards went black, and then the screens started showing falling digital snowflakes which were then complemented by smaller artificial snowflakes that dropped from the ceiling and became visible when the arena’s strobe lights started flashing.

It’s all part of creating that unique fan experience that becomes part of the team’s identity.

“In the spirit of the strength of the community in Utah, you’re going to see us support Utah football, BYU football, the Jazz and Real Salt Lake,” Armstrong said. “We share many of the same fans and have our own unique fans as well. At the end of the day, all of it is about the pride for Utah, the identity of Utah and showing the potential of this state.”

DYLAN GUENTHER SCORING THE first goal in franchise history was an important moment. But it needed those other elements to make it feel even more unique. Shortly after Guenther scored, the UHC’s goal horn blared. It wasn’t one single sound. It was the combination of several goal horns from across hockey, a detail that Armstrong said was deliberate.

While the goal horn was something the team teased on social and in its one preseason game, the goal song was another matter. Immediately after the horn, the arena shook when its sound system began blaring “Papi” by Swedish electronic artist Kaaze. It’s an anthem that needed a few seconds to let the beat build before the bass dropped with the same earworm tendencies that make “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes such an oft-played stadium favorite.

When it came to finding a goal horn, Armstrong said his team studied what it felt were the most iconic ones in the NHL. The in-game operations staff learned those horns generated a physiological response that brought fans to their feet. That’s when the club worked with a sonic expert to create a horn that suited the building’s acoustic range.

Choosing a goal song was — and remains — a conversation that continues to evolve because “it’s a living and breathing thing,” according to Armstrong.

“Through our first season, we’ll get feedback from our fans,” he said. “We may try to develop something custom over time. We’re keeping an open mind there. In terms of our goal for when we launch, it was to really elevate and sustain the energy level of our building that we want to deliver to our fans. We also wanted something that had interactive components because of fan participation.”

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Dylan Guenther scores Utah Hockey Club’s first-ever goal

Dylan Guenther nets Utah’s first ever goal in the NHL and the hometown crowd erupts.

Given the team has yet to choose a name and is currently called the Utah Hockey Club, how does that work when it comes to forming fan chants?

Armstrong said it wasn’t an issue — because the fans were already coming up with ideas. He said there was one chant in which fans in one part of the building screamed “U” and those in another answered with “TAH.” The classic “Let’s go, Utah” also was heard during the first game at Delta Center.

And for anyone wondering about a mascot, Armstrong said the team will have one, and it will be representative of the permanent team name that’s eventually chosen. In the interim, Jazz Bear will do double duty at NBA and NHL games this season.

Asked whether team captain Clayton Keller gave away the team name at the NHL’s player media tour in August — “It sounds like it’s going to be the Yeti, but I don’t know,” he told NHL.com — the exec smiled.

“Kels, I think, was speaking to the public sentiment,” Armstrong replied.

THEY HAVE A goal horn. They have a goal song. They have chants. They even have a temporary mascot with plans for a more permanent solution. They have many of the boxes checked, but some are left to answer.

For example: the national anthem. Nearly every NHL team’s fans seemingly have some part of “O Canada” or “The Star-Spangled Banner” that they loudly sing as a fan tradition. There was no one moment that stood out during Utah’s first game, but could it be possible that UHC fans scream “YOU” in the American anthem’s first line as a way of invoking the letter U for Utah? Or could they go down another route?

These are the sort of details that will be figured out in time.

But as for the initial impression after Game 1, head coach Andre Tourigny, who previously coached the Arizona Coyotes, appreciated the extravagance of the franchise opener.

“Today was special, there’s no doubt about it,” Tourigny said. “One day we will look back. I received texts from about half of the head coaches in the league today. That means something, and it’s because it’s special.”

There were fans who said they liked a lot of what they experienced during the first game, too. Priskos said what made something like the Celly cam so amazing is the fact that Utah has a history of being one of the nation’s more restrictive states for alcohol.

“What I hope people realize is that whatever you’ve heard about Salt Lake City is just not true,” Priskos said. “That it’s a sleepy town. That’s what the assumptions are. But it’s Tuesday night and everything is happening. We’re hosting the Olympics in 10 years. We’re not this quiet town anymore, and people need to realize that the Stanley Cup now comes through Utah.”

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Yankees third baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. accused the Royals‘ Maikel Garcia of intentionally trying to hurt Anthony Volpe while sliding into second base during Game 4 of a tense American League Division Series that New York clinched with a 3-1 victory Thursday night.

Garcia had led off the sixth inning with a single and Michael Massey had followed with a chopper to first base, where Jon Berti fielded the ball and stepped on the bag. He then fired to Volpe covering second for the double play, and Garcia slid hard into the base — and Volpe likewise delivered a hard tag on the Kansas City third baseman.

Tempers immediately flared and both teams flooded the field, though no punches were thrown and nobody was tossed.

“I just felt like he tried to go in and injure Volpe because he was being a sore loser. You know what I mean?” Chisholm said. “He was talking a ton on Instagram and Twitter and stuff. I do the same thing, but I’m not going to injure somebody if they’re winning a game. I didn’t like that. I told him we don’t do that on this side and I’m going to stick up for my guys.”

Chisholm had already become the villain of the series when he said Kansas City was “lucky” to win Game 2 in New York. He was reminded of the comment during every at-bat, getting a steady stream of boos from a crowd starved for postseason ball.

The Yankees jokingly booed him during a postgame celebration in the visiting clubhouse Thursday night, and looked ahead to a matchup with the Guardians or Tigers with Game 1 of the AL Championship Series scheduled for Monday night at Yankee Stadium.

The Yankees and Royals have come to loathe each other over the years, long before this playoff matchup. In fact, the angst can be traced to the 1970s, when players such as George Brett of the Royals and Graig Nettles of the Yankees would get into fist fights during games that often decided who would be representing the American League in the World Series.

It looked a lot like those days when the benches emptied Thursday night.

“Yeah, it was like if there was some kind of upset over the slide or whatever, we just go back and show a little Hal McRae and Willie Randolph and we’ll all laugh at ourselves,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said jokingly.

The near fracas wasn’t funny to anyone at the time. Chisholm was chirping at the Royals while running into the middle of the scrum, and Yankees starter Gerrit Cole — who allowed a lone run over seven innings of precise pitching — had to be held back as tensions ran high at Kauffman Stadium.

“I was holding my emotions in all night,” Cole said, “and let them out on the way to the dugout.”

It took Aaron Judge, among others, to keep the teams from coming to blows then they met near second base. And while order was restored and the game soon resumed, there was an underlying tension the rest of the way.

“I have no idea [what happened]. Honestly,” Boone said. “It was like we were out there and then it was right back into we’re at the end of a playoff game. So I haven’t even let the dust settle and talk to the guys involved.”

When asked what happened from his perspective, Royals manager Matt Quatraro was matter-of-fact: “Volpe had the ball, blocked the bag, Maikel probably didn’t care for that too much, and it got a little chippy.”

It happens in postseason baseball, especially when the Yankees and Royals are involved.