Through the telephone line, the words sound like they're tumbling down off a distant mountain, a cadence and conviction that leaves your spine tingling. Pete Dawkins was the captain of Army's 1958 unbeaten season, the first Captain of the Corps of Cadets, the Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, the youngest general in military history, a uniform decorated with voluminous acts of valor in Vietnam. He has lived a most remarkable American life, Heisman Trophy winner to war hero, Wall Street CEO to U.S. Senatorial candidate out of New Jersey. But the man's mission has stayed strangely simple: Beat Navy.

	Cadets and Midshipmen are on opposite sides of the scrimmage line, but they soon may find themselves on the same side of battle lines.

Dawkins is still sure his life is forever shaped by Army-Navy, by a football standing the test of time. So, the retired general reaches for a book on his office desk, "Field of Valor," and he wants to read his own words authored in the Afterword, wants to tell the story of a West Point classmate. All those years ago, Gen. MacArthur insisted to his '58 team, "You play for the honor of the ghosts of a million American soldiers looking down on you who gave their lives for their country," and it forever stayed with Pete Dawkins.

So, he turned to page 206 and started to tell the story of a long, lost American prisoner of war, one of 102,000 people packing Philadelphia's Municipal Stadium to watch Dawkins finish the last unbeaten season for West Point in '58, a lost brother in the Long Gray Line.

"The standard was exhibited most poignantly by my West Point classmate Rocky Versace. Held prisoner by his Vietcong captors for almost two years, tortured and sick, confined in a bamboo cage barely as big as he was, he refused to compromise his beliefs or repudiate his country. And on the night before he was executed, alone and in the dark, his fellow prisoners heard his final words as he sang, "God Bless America."

Army-Navy doesn't play for the corrupt BCS bowl system, hundred-dollar handshake boosters and no-show summer jobs. They play for a lost cause in big-time college football: Honor. For this, there isn't a bigger football game in America.

"This rivalry is so durable," Dawkins said. "To me, it's a national treasure."

West Point is 1-10. The Naval Academy is 1-10. Who cares? This is the grace and goodness of Army and Navy that transcends the way they compete against college football's wayward programs. When they're finished playing football Saturday in East Rutherford, N.J., they will stand shoulder to shoulder inside Giants Stadium, saluting the Army and Navy fight songs and most of all, they'll understand they're brothers now. The winds of war are swirling, the seniors resigned to the truth that graduation could send them all to fight in a faraway country. The Army kids will climb on those Navy ships and they'll go. Together, they'll go.

"There is a sense when you accept the reality mantle of being in harms way -- especially in times such as these that we live -- there's an even more poignant degree to which you feel a real closeness and a real shared value," Dawkins said. "It's a real bond that's palpable, that's powerful. I'm sure those 22 men on the field, when the whistle blows, they will feel it too. They always do."

	An Army-Navy game is as much about the uniformed fans in the stands as it is about the players on the field.

Most of all, Army-Navy is a testament to the young officers in the football uniforms, to those Cadets and Midshipmen wearing dress grays and blues in the Meadowlands chill, to those around the world listening on Armed Forces Radio. Yes, Navy has lost 30 of it past 32 games, finishing better than .500 only twice in 20 years. Army has lost 23 of its past 28, with just one winning season in the past decade. No one wants to see our service academies so down and out, but what's worse is the way these administrations react to it.

What was Navy AD Chet Gladchuk thinking when he fired his coach, Charlie Weatherbie, with three games left in the season a year ago? This isn't the SEC, nor the NFL. What a shameful statement of priorities, which West Point officials are guilty of, too. Army doesn't belong in Conference USA, the way Sir Lawrence Oliver doesn't belong on MTV's Spring Jam. It is a troubling statement of the times when an academy with a code that states, "A Cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do," plays ball within a conference with the Memphises and Cincinnatis of the world. Call it Conference ATM, if you like, and understand: This is a misguided alliance for Army, an embarrassment to the Corps. "Conferences used to be marriages of love," Army AD Rick Greenspan said. "Now they've become marriages of convenience."

Nevertheless, Army and Navy still believe they can be winners for a simple, solitary reason: Air Force. If they can do it, why can't we? Air Force has had sustained success over Army and Navy for several reasons: From its magnificent coach, Fisher DeBerry; to security in the Mountain West Conference; to the reality that a generation weaned on CNN video wars find flying jets a far more chic assignment than sidestepping land mines and living months on sea rations.

Pete Dawkins is the last link to national football glory for West Point, and wouldn't you know it, this week he picked up the telephone and called his old friend, a Navy Midshipmen and Heisman Trophy winner named Roger Staubach. Together, they'll tell you: There isn't a day that passes when someone doesn't want to talk to them about Army and Navy, about the biggest game in college football.

"I would love to have both teams be 11-0," Dawkins said. "Sure, I think it would add something to do it. But this isn't a game that's predicated on the brute competence of the teams ..."

It's predicated on something else, something extraordinary: They play football for the ghosts of a million lost soldiers and sailors, a distant Cadet voice singing "God Bless America" on the eve of his execution in a bamboo cage far from home. Pete Dawkins will never forget MacArthur telling the team this truth. All for one, all for them. Always.

Adrian Wojnarowski is a columnist for The Record (N.J.) and a regular contributor to ESPN.com. He can be reached at ESPNWoj@aol.com.