MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - So, they say West Virginia and Pitt are playing basketball games against each other once again.
 
The thaw in college basketball's version of the Cold War took place last September when then-Pitt athletic director Scott Barnes – viewed either as Anwar Sadat or Neville Chamberlain depending upon which side of the railroad tracks you live – agreed to play a four-game basketball series with West Virginia.
 
The first game is this Saturday night in Pittsburgh. The Mountaineers will travel to the Steel City for another game in 2019, with contests being played in Morgantown in 2018 and 2020.
 
It's difficult to anticipate what to expect on Saturday because so much has changed with both schools since they last played each other at the Petersen Events Center on Feb. 16, 2012, a 66-48 West Virginia victory.
 
Back then, Pitt and West Virginia were members of the Big East Conference and played twice annually for eight straight years. On two occasions, in 2006 and 2009, they met a third time in the conference tournament in New York City.
 
Today, Pitt is in the Atlantic Coast Conference and West Virginia plays in the Big 12. Pittsburgh media coverage of West Virginia is not what it once was when the Mountaineers were in the Big East, although it usually picks up at the end of the year when Bob Huggins' team makes its annual trek to the NCAA Tournament.
 
West Virginia's media has never covered Pitt, so general knowledge of the two programs today is relegated to basketball junkies or the people who closely follow the sport.
 
There was a time, however, when West Virginians knew the Panthers intimately. The teams recruited many of the same players so battles on the court frequently spilled over into the living rooms of local 18-year-olds considering which side of the Mason Dixon Line they wanted to spend the next four years of their lives.
 
Sometimes those guys went to Pitt, and sometimes they went to West Virginia. That's partly how the catchy phrase "Backyard Brawl" came to be, most likely coined by Pittsburgh Press sports writer Russ Franke sometime in the 1970s.
 
The football and basketball games back then were often very similar to what we saw this past Monday night when the Steelers and the Bengals bludgeoned each other to death on national TV.
 
A front-row visitor to many of those West Virginia-Pitt games was Sam Sciullo Jr., a Pittsburgh native, a Pitt graduate, a former Pitt employee and six-time author of books on Panther sports.
 
The first WVU-Pitt game he can recall took place during the 1968-69 season when Lyndon Baines Johnson was running the country.
 
"That was Buzz Ridl's first year and Pitt was 4-20," Sciullo recalled recently. "The mid to late 60s was one of the worst periods in Pitt football and Pitt basketball history. To put things in context, their games weren't even on commercial radio at the time. Some games would be on the student station or maybe the commercial station - they would pick up a big game or two."
 
Like West Virginia.
 
"I vaguely remember listening to the game on the radio," Sciullo said. "I distinctly remember Pitt won, 90-87, so that was a huge win because they had lost nine straight to West Virginia before that. They had not beaten them since, I think, '63-64, which was an NIT team for Pitt.
 
"After they won 90-87, they lost the rematch in Morgantown, which was typical in the late 60s because the home team usually won - not always, but usually."
 
Sciullo also recalls both games played in 1970 – the one in Pittsburgh when a Panther student lobbed a dead fish onto the floor as West Virginia's Wil Robinson was about to attempt a free throw, and the game down in Morgantown when West Virginia's planned celebration to close the old Field House was abruptly canceled when Pitt rallied from 19 points down to win the game, 92-87.
 
"I was at the fish game," he said. "I have an inkling of who it was who did that, but I don't have proof so I'll leave that out, but I do remember Pitt lost the game. I think Ridl might have taken the microphone to the PA system and asked the crowd to abstain from doing that stuff.
 
"It's funny because that kind of thing probably wouldn't be so shocking today, but back then the crowds were a little more demure and you didn't see the crazy antics like you see now," Sciullo said. "There is a picture of Horse Czarnecki, the eccentric Pitt groundskeeper, holding up the fish and that's a picture in my collection."
 
Sciullo fondly remembers Pitt's upset victory in Morgantown later in the year to ruin the field house closure ceremony.
 
"Down there the game in Morgantown, I remember listening to that on the radio," he recalled. "Pitt was down by 19 in the first half and they had a guard named Kent Scott from Missouri, a real dead-eye shooter, and he ended up with about 32 points that night.
 
"I remember Bob Smizik, a Pitt graduate and a writer for many years for the Pittsburgh Press and Post-Gazette, telling me a story about (the late) Mickey Furfari. The press row hung above the court in the old field house down there, and Mickey would run back and forth yelling at the officials from up there. And I can picture him doing that!"
 
Sciullo began going to games down in Morgantown in the mid-1970s when he got a little older. One of his first was an ECAC tournament game pitting top-seeded Pitt against No. 4 West Virginia at the relatively new WVU Coliseum in 1975.
 
This was a year after the Panthers posted a 25-win season with an all-Pittsburgh lineup that featured Braddock forward Billy Knight.
 
Although Knight was off to the NBA, several players from the '74 team were still around in '75.
 
"That was a weird situation because there were no official league standings," Sciullo remembered. "The last spot in the ECAC tournament came down to West Virginia and Duquesne, and I believe Duquesne may have had the better overall record, but West Virginia had beaten them handily in Pittsburgh that season. Duquesne lost a close game at Cincinnati when Norm Nixon went to the line and missed one or both. After that loss, it was widely presumed in Pittsburgh that West Virginia would get the bid as the host school.
 
"So, obviously it looked very political that they would get in because that would enhance attendance at the event. Pitt and West Virginia split the two games that year, and I think the scores were almost identical," Sciullo said. "Pitt went down there and fell behind 15 points or so early in the second half and made a nice comeback but had some players foul out. I know Buzz Ridl, who rarely if ever got mad at the officials, was quite mad after that game and even said so."
 
Sciullo continued.
 
"I remember (forward) Melvin Bennett, who only played one year at Pitt his freshman year – he was from Peabody High School – he had 22 points and 21 rebounds in that game. (Pitt's leading scorer) Kirk Bruce was one of the players who fouled out and one of the fouls was against Eartha Faust, a little West Virginia guard who was kind of built like Lowes Moore.
 
"Well, after a nice play or something, Bruce just tapped him on the rear and the officials called a foul on him for doing that! Back in the 60s and 70s other coaches … Red Manning, who coached at Duquesne for many years, told me that you knew you were going to get some breaks playing at home so that was sort of expected then."
 
Sciullo admitted the common Pitt fan didn't think too highly of West Virginia's Bob Huggins, partly because of Huggins' run-ins with Duquesne guard B.B. Flenory.
 
"That incident with Flenory got a lot of play here in the media," Sciullo recalled. "Back then, the triangle rivalry among Pitt, Duquesne and West Virginia was very close. When they went to their separate conferences, that evaporated. Everybody knew everybody else's business back then so people in Pittsburgh knew who Bob Huggins was. The thing about Huggins is they knew he was a coach's son – smart, tough, good ballplayer, but played off the edge a little bit."
 
The Pitt-WVU games remained heated and highly competitive throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s when Gale Catlett took over at West Virginia and Roy Chipman was coaching at Pitt.
 
The rivalry reached a boiling point in 1982 when Pitt announced before the season that it was leaving the Eastern 8 to join the Big East.
 
West Virginia beat the Panthers twice in hotly contested games, one coming in Pittsburgh when a lane violation negated a late Pitt free throw, which helped the Mountaineers to a 48-45 victory.
 
Afterward, an irate Chipman was seen chasing down the official who made the call yelling, "That was a chicken-#$%@, Mickey Mouse call!"
 
A month later, West Virginia outlasted the Panthers, 82-77, before the largest crowd to ever watch a game at the Coliseum, listed at 16,704 but likely exceeded 17,000.
 
Catlett needled Pitt after the game, calling the Panthers a "mediocre program," which quickly got back to Chipman.
 
"I liked Gale Catlett," Sciullo said. "I worked at the Eastern 8 office and there was a lot of animosity toward Pitt that year, and understandably so. Catlett was the perfect coach for West Virginia, and I think he falls under the radar as far as the great college basketball coaches if you look at his overall record and the number of 20-win seasons he had.
 
"He was very shrewd and savvy, and he saw and understood the big picture more so than some of Pitt's coaches there at the time, who were strictly basketball coaches," Sciullo continued. "Catlett knew how to play the media, and he wasn't afraid to play the bad guy. He reminded me a lot of Jackie Sherrill, another guy who doesn't have the greatest public perception or reputation. They're not afraid of being unpopular and I admire people like that."
 
Catlett's Donald Trump-esque remarks made a volatile situation nuclear when the two teams met in the Eastern 8 championship game 10 days later in Pittsburgh. The interest and attention for this college basketball game rivaled any ever played in the Steel City.
 
More than 16,000, equally distributed between Pitt and West Virginia fans, stuffed themselves inside the old Civic Arena to see one of the most eagerly anticipated games the two teams ever played.
 
West Virginia had won 23 straight games, was ranked ninth in the country and had an NCAA bid already locked up; Pitt's only hope of reaching the national tournament was a win over the Mountaineers in the Eastern 8 finals.
 
"Dwayne Wallace and Clyde Vaughan had big games for Pitt," Sciullo said. "They shot lights out and I tell people to this day that was the most electrifying crowd I had ever seen at a college basketball game in Pittsburgh. When each team scored, the reaction was the same from each side. The comments that Gale Catlett had made a week and a half earlier are really what provided the extra motivation for Pitt that night.
 
"That was Pitt's farewell to the Eastern 8 Conference, winning the conference tournament for the second year in a row."
 
After that, the two teams didn't entirely part ways. Games were played each year on a home-and-home basis throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s until West Virginia joined the Big East in all sports in 1995.
 
Then, the two teams began playing multiple times a year for most of the time the two were in the Big East together - the games once again ratcheting up in intensity. Pitt began to dominate the series toward the end of Catlett's coaching tenure and continued to have its way with the Mountaineers when John Beilein took over in 2003.
 
But Beilein did orchestrate one of the more memorable comeback victories in the series when his Mountaineer team, behind the outside shooting of 6-foot-11-inch center Kevin Pittsnogle, came back from 14 points down in the second half to stun the 18^th-ranked Panthers, 70-66, at the Pedersen Events Center.
 
It was one of the few times Pitt had lost on its home floor since the Petersen Events Center opened in 2002.
 
"What was interesting about that was Beilein's West Virginia teams at that time weren't very strong rebounding, inside teams," Sciullo recalled. "Pitt had Chris Taft and Aaron Gray, two big guys, and Taft had a field day in the first half. That was Dixon's second year as a head coach, and he seemed so worried about trying to defend Pittsnogle in the last nine minutes of the game and he forgot about trying to score and take advantage of what Pitt had inside with those two big kids.
 
"That just completely blew up in Pitt's face and that was one of the most dramatic turnarounds I had ever seen on Pitt's home floor."
 
Sciullo has continued to follow Pitt basketball since its move to the ACC, but he is part of a declining generation of Steel City college basketball fans who can remember what it was like when the two biggest basketball schools in the area used to play each other on an annual basis.
 
And yes, that includes Penn State, which also is rumored to play some hoops.
 
"In the heyday, West Virginia was right there with Duquesne (as Pitt's biggest rival)," he said. "Those would be the best crowds. North Carolina came to the Field House in '71-72, Billy Knight's first game actually, and Duke came with (Mike) Giminski, (Gene) Banks and (Jim) Spanarkle in '78-79, but I would say (the West Virginia games) would be even with Duquesne.
 
"It's so different now because once Pitt joined the Big East you have a whole generation of fans who didn't experience the rivalry with Duquesne and West Virginia," he said. "Today, I don't think Pitt has any business being in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Those aren't their natural rivals, but we know how the landscape of college basketball is now."
 
At any rate, Pitt and West Virginia, two old local rivals, are playing once again Saturday night. This should reinvigorate the interest of local college basketball fans even if many of them today are ignorant of the long history these two schools once shared spanning 106 years and 184 games.
 
Sciullo said the only way Pitt and West Virginia will become familiar to each other again is by playing.
 
"Unfortunately, not being in the same conference, you are not following that team's fortunes as you would be if they were," he said. "It's going to be difficult, but at least playing once a year is a start."

It sure is.
 
But the ice has finally thawed. Now, we wait and see just how heated things will get inside the Petersen Events Center on Saturday night at 8 p.m.
 
ESPN2 will televise the game nationally.