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Notre Dame game days are rich with tradition. Trumpets in the dome. Pre-game Mass and player walk. The concert on the steps. Long-running family tailgates. The victory march, the leprechaun, gold helmets running out onto the field and those four famous words: “Here come the Irish.”

There’s one tradition, though, that often flies under the radar and has a bird’s-eye view of the rest: the flags high above Notre Dame Stadium.

The tradition dates back to at least the late 1990s. When the “House That Rockne Built” was renovated in 1997, the new upper bowl included the addition of two flagpoles towering over the stadium’s north tunnel. Barren for six to seven months out of the year, during football season, they provide a splash of color, displaying pennants in the colors of Notre Dame and its weekly opponents.

The journey of the pennants themselves begins in an unlikely location: Charleston, S.C. That’s where Jason Brooke and his team at Carolina Flag and Banner are hard at work making custom flags of all shapes and sizes.

The store takes care of the whole process “from cradle to grave,” cutting UV-resistant, coated, 200-denier nylon into the larger-than-life six-foot by 12-foot triangles that form the field of the pennant. From there, they cut, hem and add the heading and grommets. They sew on the colorful school lettering that gives the pennants their character from a selection of 70 different color swatches.

“There’s not a whole lot we can’t do,” said Brooke, the store’s owner of 25 years. He bought the business back in 2001, but Carolina Flag and Banner has a tradition dating back more than 40 years. For as long as Brooke has been a part of the company, they’ve been working with Notre Dame.

“Every spring when we get the official schedule of the teams we are going to play, we go through our inventory, see which ones we have, put them in a bin and anything we’re missing, we order some,” said Ryan Watt, operations manager of football facilities for the University. Watt, a 2015 Notre Dame graduate, helps oversee the Irish Athletic Center, Guglielmino Athletics Complex, Notre Dame Stadium and yes, the flags flying above it.

The inventory overseen by Watt is extensive. The Stadium possesses a collection of 83 total pennants deep within its bowels, including 60 different opponent pennants. That includes many that Notre Dame fans will recognize from regularity, including the likes of Stanford, Southern Cal, Navy and Boston College.

“The ACC partnership helps us out, the rotation helps a lot, the historic rivalries help us out. We’re always pulling out Stanford every year, so we know every couple of years we have to order a new Stanford one,” said Watt.

The collection encompasses some more obscure ones and some unsavory ones, too. Few Notre Dame fans will want to remember the gold and royal blue of Tulsa’s pennant from 2010. Fewer in this year’s graduating class will want to recall the bright green and white of Marshall from 2022. The oldest two pennants kept in the stadium date back to just after the stadium renovation: Baylor, from 1997, and Kansas, from 1998.

At a University where the football calendar shapes student life in every facet, from free time to the exam schedule, Notre Dame’s flag flying tradition has become almost like a way of telling time. The raising and lowering of a new opponent's pennant each week shows the passage of another fall.

“We get together the full season of flags, all the teams we are going to play, a blue ND [flag] and a green ND [flag], and we give that over to the grounds crew prior to the start of the season. I believe they do it on Monday morning, they swap them out and put up whoever we’re playing that week.”

Just like the hearts of diehard fans, the flags get quite battered and worn over the course of a season, too. Exposed to all the South Bend elements from sunshine to snow, their tips often begin to fray and by season’s end, it’s time for retirement. But the old ones don’t go to the dump.

“A lot of these are in pretty poor shape, but we just hang onto them,” said Watt. “They’re fun history.”

Indeed, Notre Dame has never lacked for fun history or traditions. Oftentimes, the lesser-known ones hide in plain sight — all you have to do is look up.