So, did you hear the one about the Pitt Golden Girl, the Notre Dame sax man, and the Chicago vice squad?

Likely you didn't, because there's no such joke anywhere in comparative literature, and yet the shocking true details came out yesterday around a square wooden table at Manor Care in Green Tree, where Ace Diamond pulled the Golden Girl's picture from his wallet again.

That's right, Ace Diamond, the Uptown lawyer with the name straight out of pulp fiction. Yet it's all wonderfully true. And there she is in the dog-eared photo, a 5-foot-8 redhead in gold spangles, who yesterday happened to be sitting at the same table.

This is their Pitt-Notre Dame story, and it's a beauty, with no amount of dust able to diminish its genuineness and its heart.

"I was at Notre Dame from 1969 to 1973, when Joe Theismann was there," Ace begins. "I got into Duquesne Law School, and, three years later, I was taking the bar exam with a classmate of mine, Ray, who'd gone to Pitt. Pitt was going to play Notre Dame that year late in the season, but the TV network moved it to the first game, and Ray and I decided to go out to South Bend and watch it."

Ace knew the football traditions of both schools, which play each other for the 65th time Saturday night at Heinz Field, but he knew something else, something that would prove equally compelling on the evening-into-morning of Sept. 11-12, 1976. An alto sax player as an Irish undergrad, he knew band tradition. He knew the band room at Notre Dame's Sacred Heart Church was used by the visiting band on football Saturdays, that postgame refreshments were served, and alumni were welcome.

"So here's this good-looking redhead, one of the Golden Girls, and she was getting a lot of attention," Ace says. "Finally, she comes over to me and Ray and says, 'Those guys over there are really bothering me; could you pretend like you know me?' "

Ace likely had been pretending already, but he knew nothing of the little miracle that put the redhead in the band room in the first place.

"There were nine of us in the original Golden Girls," Jacqueline Diamond remembered during a break from her shift as the Green Tree facility's Director of Care Delivery. "I was actually cross-registered. I was paying tuition at Duquesne in the nursing school, but I'd always been a dancer and a majorette. I wasn't even sure I wanted to be a nurse. I was thinking about taking dance at Point Park. But, when Pitt had an opening with the Golden Girls, I was able to cross-register and take a course at Pitt, and I beat out 100 candidates for one open spot."

Yeah, you know what they say. One minute you're trying to get your head around organic chemistry on the Bluff and the next you're talking to Ace Diamond in the band room at Notre Dame after a 31-10 Pitt victory. And Jackie's first impression of Ace?

"Well, he was taller than me, so that was good because I usually attract short men, babies, and dogs."

No dogs are harmed in the remainder of this story, but things got real complicated real fast. Ace and Ray established that the Pitt band was staying in Chicago that night and suggested that Jackie find a female band friend and join them there for dinner.

"Ray and I are standing in the lobby of their hotel, it was right there on Michigan Avenue downtown, when this guy comes through the lobby with a case of booze on his shoulder."

The booze guy has somehow lost the rest of his convention, but still has a key to the Playboy Club. The party started there and, after a very late dinner, returned to the hotel three-ish.

All right, cue the sirens.

"Police cars came from every direction," Ace says. "Red lights, all kinds of vehicles. It was the vice squad. I guess they'd seen us dropping off these attractive women at three in the morning. They cornered us. We told them we'd just graduated from Duquesne Law School."

That seemed to lower the temperature a little, but it led only to the end of Chapter 1.

"I didn't see him again for six months," Jackie said. "It was St. Patrick's Day, '77, and I was having a bad day. I had clinical all day, and I had class at 6 p.m. that didn't get out until 8. When I got out, I told my friend, 'I need some green beer.'

"There was a place then called Frank and Wally's, where everyone at Duquesne went. I go in there, drinking my green beer, and this guy comes up to me and says, 'Did you make it home from Chicago OK?' I didn't know him right away. Then I go, 'Oh Ace, it's you!"

Two years later, they were married at the Hilton. Jackie did her Golden Girl routine. Ace marched in to the Notre Dame Victory March. If there were vice cops, none got mentioned yesterday.

Their son, A.J., is a lawyer who graduated from Duquesne. Their daughter, Danielle, is a student at Franklin & Marshall. A.J. played trumpet in the Pitt band.

Notre Dame lost to Navy last weekend and to some that makes the Saturday night Pitt-Notre Dame game less important, but the unspoken secret is that the games are never really important. Pitt and Notre Dame could be unbeaten and ranked 1 and 2, and it still wouldn't be really important because an important game is an oxymoron.

Stories like Ace and Jackie's, on the other hand, are, I suspect, why these things matter.

Check out Ray Fittipaldo's Pitt B-Ball blog and Paul Zeise's Pitt Stop videos about football exclusively on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.