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GREENVILLE -- The purple haze of days gone by wafted over Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium on a perfectly prepared Saturday afternoon. Rock music blared from gigantic speakers, and the smell of football was in the air again. If you closed your eyes, it felt like 1970.

As a multitude of ECU fans filed into their stadium for the big game, a man under an alumni tent played a folk guitar, strumming soft rock songs until one of the alumni standing nearby could stand it no more.

"In the old days,'' he yelled to no one in particular, "somebody would've ripped that guitar out of his hands and destroyed it!''

The old Animal House days are no more at Easy U, and the Pirates take big games when they can get them. State, previously a 1-5 team that hadn't won a game against a Division I-A school in more than a year, beat East Carolina 34-20 in the second State-ECU game ever played in Greenville.

The resumption of a truncated rivalry dating to 1970 brought back memories of great games, some legislated and some not, and tragic incidents involving shrubbery. State was in Greenville for the first time since 1999.

All week, ECU fans in and around Greenville got ready for what many considered the game of the year. The town was decked out in ceremony, bunting hanging from the porticos of frat houses, bedsheets hanging from balconies of dormitories. At halftime of the game, somebody produced an old wooden barrel the two schools apparently have been playing for all these years. The barrel looked like a keg. It also looked brand new.

The State-ECU rivalry is barely understood outside Greenville. And if not for the wrangling of some legislators a few years back, the rivalry would have died after the brawl of 1987, when East Carolina fans stormed the field at N.C. State, tearing down a fence and some shrubbery and sending an N.C. State security guard to the hospital. Some in the Wolfpack community vowed never to play ECU again.

Lo and behold, they were forced together for one of the great games in either school's history, the Peach Bowl played on Jan. 1, 1992 and won 37-34 by ECU, a game still stuck in the craw of State fans everywhere.

The rivalry got traction in the strangest of places.

A handful of state senators got together a few years later and basically forced North Carolina and N.C. State to play ECU, occasionally in Greenville, citing fairness and commerce and things like that. The series made a grudging restart in 1996, when ECU slammed State in Charlotte 50-29 and rekindled a smoldering resentment. When the Pirates beat State in Greenville three years later, the Wolfpack fired its coach.

Saturday's was the sixth meeting in 12 years and the first between Skip Holtz, the third-year coach at East Carolina, and Tom O'Brien, the first-year coach at State. Neither did much during the week to fire up the masses, proof that this was basically a nonconference game between distant neighbors. The noise out of Greenville's football fans during the week didn't reach Raleigh, which made no noise at all about playing East Carolina.

ECU beat State last year, and the Wolfpack fired its coach again.

The once-incendiary series will continue with games scheduled for Raleigh in 2008, 2010 and 2013 and games scheduled for Greenville in 2009, 2012 and 2016 in the name of fairness and the eastern North Carolina economy.

ECU is stuck in Conference USA, a far-flung league that houses few rivalries at all, much less rivalries ECU can point to. But the Pirates can always point to N.C. State and the 10 times they have beaten the Wolfpack dating back to 1977, when Pat Dye dragged old ECC into the Division-I big-time with a shocking 28-23 victory over N.C. State.

Since that night, when a parade of Pirates came back down old U.S. 264, probably not carrying an old wooden barrel but possibly several kegs, football has been important here. They open each game with a rousing rendition of "Purple Haze" blasting through a great sound system, and ECU grads from all generations stand as if it's 1970 and utter guttural noises that sound like something a pirate might utter. Otherwise, little has changed here at Easy U.

After tailgating all day, more than 43,500 fans jammed into the stadium for the game of the year and saw State score three touchdowns in 3:26 to take a 21-0 lead before all the parking lots emptied into the stands.

As the sun sank lower in the sky and eventually over the horizon where the rest of the Conference USA games were being played, East Carolina withered.

This has always been a night crowd, and football here has always been played best after sunset. Saturday wasn't one of those nights. N.C. State turned mean and lost a player to ejection, inciting the ECU crowd. Nothing could ignite the East Carolina football team, though, as State wore down the Pirates and beat them on their own field, running up the score in the final minutes as 43,500 fans began to file out.

As the last of them walked away, they heard the dulcet tones of the N.C. State alma mater, and 1970 seemed like 37 years ago.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ehardin@news-record.com