NEW ORLEANS — Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua woke up Wednesday at 5:30 a.m. and checked his phone. Several news alerts popped up. The words “domestic terror attack” flashed across his screen. He clicked the first link wondering where the incident happened.

“It turned out,” Bevacqua said after Notre Dame’s 23-10 win over Georgia on Thursday in the Allstate Sugar Bowl, “that it happened just a few blocks from us.”

Wednesday, Jan. 1 was supposed to be game day for the coaches and players at Georgia and Notre Dame. Instead, most had a similar sense of dread and confusion as Bevacqua when they awoke to phone messages from family and friends, all asking about the attack in New Orleans, where a man drove his pickup truck down Bourbon Street a little after 3 a.m., killing 14 people and injuring dozens more before being shot and killed by police.

In the 36 hours that followed, officials, coaches and administrators from the schools and bowl game worked around the clock — first to confirm the physical safety of hundreds of players, staff, family and friends, and then to simultaneously make sure everyone could process the tragedy while also finding a way to play a college football game that would be the biggest of the season for both teams.

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey received a call from Sugar Bowl CEO Jeff Hundley a little after 6 a.m. on Wednesday. Hundley explained that an incident had occurred on Bourbon Street, just three blocks from Georgia’s team hotel. Details were sketchy, but there was already talk that the game’s scheduled kickoff on Wednesday night could be in jeopardy.

Sankey has been through similar uncertainty before, he said — the COVID-19 season, a bomb threat before a bowl game — and his first instinct was to let the dust settle, to avoid the rumors and speculation in favor of hard facts. So, he decided to go for a run. He left his hotel, turned down Canal Street in the heart of the French Quarter, and quickly understood just how grim the situation was.

“You see the coroner’s wagon,” Sankey said, “and I realized pretty quickly the scope of the scene.”

Earlier in the week, Notre Dame quarterback Riley Leonard had gone around the locker room asking each of his teammates if they had spare tickets for the game. Leonard is from Fairhope, Alabama, less than a three-hour drive from New Orleans, and this was the closest he’d ever had to a home game in his college career. He had close to 100 family and friends, including the mayor of Fairhope, planning to make the trip.

By Wednesday morning, he was just hoping few had yet to get into their cars for the drive.

Leonard’s father, Chad, awakened to the sounds of emergency vehicles just after 3 a.m. but assumed it was the typical background noise in a city like New Orleans, where the revelry doesn’t end until the sun is up, and the sirens are part of the soundtrack of the party. His wife, Heather, also noticed all the text messages popping up on her phone but assumed it was friends saying, “Happy New Year” and didn’t check until morning.

“It was just a sad, bizarre day trying to communicate with everybody,” Heather Leonard said.

Chad Leonard did a quick roll call, scrolling through his phone to reach out to everyone he knew who was planning to be at the game. Everyone was safe.

Meanwhile, Chad and Heather were being pinged by the staff at Notre Dame. After accounting for players and support staff, head coach Marcus Freeman turned his attention to the cadre of family members he knew were in town to support their sons.

“They wanted every parent to check in and make sure their group was OK,” Heather Leonard said. “They told us the players were all OK, and they just wanted to make sure we were good.”

Georgia and Notre Dame players were effectively under lockdown at their team hotels through the early part of the day, still unsure if there was a game to be played.

Figuring out that part fell to a small group of law enforcement, government officials, conference and team personnel and Hundley, the Sugar Bowl CEO.

“It was a whirlwind,” Hundley said. “I was questioning what it meant, were we going to be able to play?”

Hundley was a centerpiece in a phone tree that extended from Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry to the city’s police chief, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, leadership at the FBI and state police department, Sankey and the teams’ athletics directors, along with the staff at the Caesars Superdome, which was scheduled to host the Sugar Bowl on Wednesday and then immediately make room for another event happening Thursday.

By midmorning, Hundley said, it was clear the game couldn’t be played as scheduled. The bulk of the city’s law enforcement was focused on investigating the attack. And as of a Wednesday afternoon news conference, investigators still believed the attack could involve more than just the driver of the pickup truck. So, safety concerns for the city remained, and there would be insufficient security for the game.

Landry quickly got to work connecting city and Sugar Bowl officials with law enforcement around the region. Hundley said he was convinced the game could safely be played the following day. Unlike in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when the Sugar Bowl was moved to Atlanta, there was never any serious discussion of changing venues.

“There was confidence from law enforcement they’d have the necessary assets in place,” Hundley said. “And this is a big-event city. When it comes to logistics, we can do almost anything. We knew it would be a matter of just working through details.”

Still, those details were massive. Sugar Bowl officials had to work to ensure there were enough hotel rooms for the teams for an extra night, work with law enforcement to beef up security, adjust the Superdome’s event schedule, and work with ESPN and other media partners to find a broadcast window that worked.

The initial plan was to move the game back 24 hours and kick off in a prime-time TV window Thursday, but both teams were eager to play the game as soon as it was safe to do so. Sankey had been on a text chain with Georgia president Jere Morehead, AD Josh Brooks and head coach Kirby Smart throughout the day. Bevacqua said he traded more than 20 texts with College Football Playoff executive director Rich Clark, hoping to find a path to get the game played as quickly as possible. Ultimately, city and state leaders were able to gather support from the FBI, ATF and other Louisiana and out-of-state police departments to cover security needs for the game.

“The winning team would’ve already lost a day in that,” Sankey said. “So, there were some questions that produced more phone calls and text messages. About 3 or 4 p.m. we understood that there’d be enough time for security preparations [for a 3 p.m. CT kickoff].”

In the team hotels, coaches were working to find a course of action that allowed the teams to process the tragedy of the day while still focusing on a game that needed to be played.

Smart set up a FaceTime call with coaches and team leadership and came up with a plan. “We brought the players down and met with them and said, ‘This is the plan moving forward,'” Smart said. “They said, ‘Let’s go. Put the ball down and get ready to go play.'”

Freeman’s initial thought was to keep the team as dialed in to football as possible but changed his mind.

“Once you found out more details about the tragedy, the emotions took over each individual differently,” he said.

Notre Dame team chaplain Rev. Nathan D. Wills held a team prayer service that afternoon.

“It’s OK to mourn for what happened in this city and what happened to these victims,” Bevacqua said of the prayer service message. “But you can also enjoy what you have tomorrow and this opportunity. That’s the human condition, right? Dealing with the worst of the worst and this unbelievable moment in the lives of these young student athletes, almost simultaneously. I think that was tough on them, but it’s to the credit of Coach Freeman and his staff, I think the team handled it so well.”

Freeman held a normal walk-through and a team meeting, but then he gave the team three hours Wednesday night to visit with family.

“Being a parent myself, in times of tragedy, you want to be around your children,” Freeman said. “I think that helped the parents as much as it helped the players to be around each other, and to help them reset and get their mind into a place that it needed to be.”

It was a necessary escape, defensive end R.J. Oben said.

“It was good to take time off to spend with our families and clear our minds,” he said. “We woke up with the intention to play a game. We didn’t really know we weren’t going to be playing until about 3 in the afternoon. Once we talked about it, Coach gave us a schedule, guys stayed together and stayed locked in.”

A number of players stayed in — some watching movies on Netflix, some getting extra rest, and a number investing in more film study of Georgia, including Leonard.

After team meetings, Leonard texted quarterbacks coach Gino Guidugli and asked to get in some extra work. They spent more than four hours sifting through tape of Georgia.

“Every single person in our locker room is praying for those families that are out there,” Leonard said. “But as a Notre Dame player, you recruit the right people for a reason. And I think adding another day is just helping our superpower out. We say our superpowers all the time: our preparation and the character in our locker room. Those are two intangible things that we have that we utilize.”

If Leonard thought the extra time benefited the Irish, Smart was quick to dismiss any notion that the tragic events had any impact on how his team performed when it finally took the field.

“That was a very traumatic event,” Smart said. “But this team was focused and ready to go play. So, I’m not going to sit here and talk about the tragedy affecting our team. Notre Dame played well. We didn’t play great. But when we turned the ball over twice and have a kickoff returned, that’s what I attribute the loss to. Not to the tragedy or what happened. And that’s not any disrespect to the community of New Orleans or the people with tragic losses.”

By Thursday morning, Bourbon Street had reopened to foot traffic. Revelers — many in Georgia red and black or Notre Dame green and gold — enjoyed lunch and cocktails before making their way to the stadium for a midafternoon kickoff.

But around the Superdome, it was clear things had changed. Most streets surrounding the stadium were closed to vehicle traffic. K-9 units and armed police were omnipresent. SWAT team trucks were parked on nearly every corner, and photographers snapped pictures of the eerie scene.

Inside the stadium though, the reverie continued.

More than 57,000 fans came through the gates — about 80% of what had initially been expected — for a robust turnout that surprised even Hundley.

New Orleans native Samyra sang the national anthem, and the crowd erupted in chants of “U-S-A, U-S-A.” Before the game, Notre Dame players decided they wanted to make a gesture of support. They ran onto the field carrying the American flag.

“It was a hard day for many reasons but the teamwork with [local, state and bowl officials] — everybody came together and said, ‘Let’s try to make the best situation out of a really horrible moment in time for the city and America,” said Bevacqua, who spent Wednesday from 5:30 a.m. to midnight on the phone trying to make the game happen. “And there was such energy in the stadium. That was comforting to see.”

Notre Dame won. That won’t be what most fans remember about this year’s Sugar Bowl. As Hundley stood on the field amid postgame confetti and celebrations, having barely slept in the past 40 hours, he thought that perhaps they won’t remember it entirely for an act of terrorism either. Instead, they might also think of the resilience of a city and the effort of so many people who came together to ensure the game could be played.

“Sports can really be a healing exercise,” Hundley said. “I don’t know if this was or wasn’t, but I sure hope it was.”

Mark Schlabach contributed to this story.