I printed out both pages and went year-by-year to see where the discrepancies appeared. I found four years where the two record books had the games taking place at different locations, three of them before 1905. That was a pretty long time ago so it was not shocking to see there could have been some misunderstanding.

The 1953 game, a 21-21 tie, was listed in the Minnesota book as taking place in Madison while we had it in Minneapolis. I ventured into our archive room, a cramped, dusty room filled with file cabinets, old books with the covers falling off and black-and-white "action" photos of players from decades ago. I found the original box score which proved it had taken place in Minneapolis. Easy fix.

I knew the early games would be harder to find. In our archive room, every football season has a folder dating back to 1946. Before that, it's hit or miss. And once you get back into the 1920's and earlier, it's mostly miss.

For some reason, we have a folder on 1901, which was one of the discrepancies. Inside that folder was a game program from our game against Minnesota. It said "Madison, Wis." so that proved the location for that game. I opened it up to see if it had any sort of series history listed that might help determine the location of the 1892 game.

Unfortunately, the locations of the earlier games were not listed but I found something more interesting. The score for the 1892 game said, "Wisconsin 40 .... Minnesota 32." What made that interesting was that both record books had the score listed as 32-4 with Minnesota winning. Doing a little more digging, that's the way the game was listed in the "University of Wisconsin 1948 football facts and centennial sports review," the earliest such document I could find.

With no folder for 1892 in our archive room I recalled that the University undertook a project a couple years ago to digitize all the old Badger Yearbooks. For some reason, the 1892 football season review, including scores and schedule, appeared in the 1894 edition of "The badger" (printing must have been a very time-consuming endeavor before the turn of the century). Right there on page 128, it said "Oct. 29, 1892 at Madison - U.W., 40; Minnesota, 32."

Some time between 1901 and 1948, the score got mixed up. Looking closer at the 1892 season, Wisconsin also dropped a 32-4 game to Illinois on Oct. 19. Could that have caused the mix-up? Not sure.

The next step was to contact my counterpart at Minnesota and tell him of my findings and show him the proof. Luckily, the intense Border Battle rivalry does not extend to the Athletic Communications staffs. His response was basically, "Good research. We'll get it changed on our end." Which prompted me to consider changing a few more scores from the early years but my conscience got the best of me.

A couple smaller things I found during my three hours of research on Sunday were that the 1898 game was a 29-0 win for Bucky (not 28-0 as Minnesota had it) and the 1903 game took place in Madison (not Minneapolis, as our book had it).

In a rivalry that has seen trophies disappear (the Slab of Bacon), games cancelled by the President of the United States (1906) and improbable, last-minute victories (Minnesota handing UW its only loss in 1993, UW's "Miracle in the Metrodome" in 2005), this is just one more thing to add to the series lore.

So, while everyone who bleeds Badger Red is hoping for a victory in Minneapolis on Saturday, UW already picked up a win earlier this week to draw closer in the series. Not sure if that makes it eight-straight for the Badgers but I feel I did my part to protect the Axe this week.