By MONTE DUTTON

It was good to be back at Furman on Monday. It’ll be great to be there on Saturday when The Citadel comes to town.

I suppose the annual battles between South Carolina’s Athens and Sparta don’t seem as frantic as they once did. The addition to the Southern Conference of a nearby assemblage of liberal artists, Wofford College, doubled up the annual nemeses. The Citadel plays its military cousin, Virginia Military Institute, for something called the Silver Shako. The Bellhops – I thought that was the nickname until I was a junior – probably stress the shako because they win it more often.

When I was at Furman, bands of male students armed themselves with baseball bats and piled into the beds of pickup trucks to protect the pristine campus from military defacement. While we greeted the dawn in triumph, word arrived that cadets, being well versed – okay, versed at all – in the nuances of tactics, had launched a sneak attack on the unprotected Sirrine Stadium frontier downtown, and the physical plant had sent troops for cleanup of baby-blue spray paint.

The Citadel won that Saturday night’s game, 17-16, when a punt, bouncing along the ground, took a radical bounce and made contact with a Paladin, the Bulldogs recovered, and damned if I don’t think that night ruined the whole season.

As this Saturday approaches – the home games are now played at stately Paladin Stadium – The Citadel is 0-5 and Furman is 3-1, ranked fourth and fifth in the Football Championship Subdivision polls and with visions of championships dancing in their heads.

Earlier this year, The Citadel stunned Furman’s SoCon champion men’s basketball team in Charleston, which, to paraphrase Norman Thayer’s remark about Baltimore in On Golden Pond, has always been a sneaky town.

The Citadel has my grudging respect. Also my hatred.

The last time I got stopped for speeding, I saw in the rear-view mirror a 5-foot-8, musclebound trooper advancing on my vehicle. I knew he was a Citadel graduate, that he’d see the Furman sticker in my back window and that I would not be getting away with a warning.

They love their school, those Bellhops, and for that, I admire them. I love Furman just as much. They just love The Citadel for all the wrong reasons, that’s all.

Where is the common ground? Pat Conroy. The late novelist, graduated from The Citadel, and Furman alums loved him because he wrote about it. I’m satisfied The Lords of Discipline topped the sales list at the campus bookstore back in the day, when reading wasn’t obsolete.

I want the Paladins to win, 100-0, but deep in my soul, I’m afraid they won’t. Not 100-0. The Paladins have too much class for that.

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