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There are a few words Steve Siewe first heard 35 years ago as a University of Dayton football player that — thanks to his teammate Matt Dahlinghaus — he has never forgotten.

One is gavotte.

"During the (1972) season, Matt had this thing where he wanted to improve himself by going to the dictionary every day and coming up with a new word," Siewe said. "Trouble was, he'd use that word then until he drove you nuts. One time the word was crass and he must have used it 30 times in 20 minutes until I begged him to stop.

"Another time we heard that Carly Simon song 'You're So Vain' and it has a line 'You had one eye in the mirror as you watched yourself gavotte.'

"I said, 'What the hell's gavotte?' He looks it up and it meant something like dancing or pirouetting. Now any time I hear that song, I think of Matt."

According to Webster's, gavotte is a "17th century dance like a minuet — only faster and livelier."

And that's just how Dahlinghaus played football and went through life — fast and lively.

Then came that November afternoon in 1972 — the day Matt stopped dancing and lay there unmoving on Bowling Green's Doyt Perry Field.

A tall, lanky, 195-pound junior defensive tackle, Matt was undersized for the position, but more than made up for it — as fellow starting tackle Dr. Tim Quinn now puts it — because of his "relentless" style of play.

Quinn, a local orthopedic surgeon of note who serves as one of UD's team doctors — roomed with Dahlinghaus on the road and remembers their pregame meal at Bowling Green:

"They had steak and potatoes, but Matt and I wanted something different, so we got toast and honey and ate it outside and just talked. I remember that moment like it was yesterday."

Before the game, Siewe — the Flyers center and a teammate of Dahlinghaus' back at Chaminade High — went through his usual routine with his longtime pal:

"I'd look Matt up and we'd do two hits of the shoulder pads on the right side, then grab each other's arms and do two hits on the left. Then we'd coco butt each other just to knock the cobwebs out. One time, I remember we hit so hard I was seeing stars and he just ran out on the field giggling."

Some of those hits may well have been harder than the one in the second quarter that Dahlinghaus put on Bowling Green tailback Paul Miles.

"It was just an average off-tackle play, except that Matt didn't get up," Quinn said. "At first we figured he got his bell rung, but then we noticed he wasn't moving. Finally, the emergency crew came out on the field and, in the huddle, all of us kind of had this feeling deep in the stomach that something was tremendously wrong."

Siewe remembers watching the ambulance take Matt out the open end of the stadium and straight to the nearby interstate.

"Pretty soon we could see it going up I-75 toward Toledo," he said quietly. "After that, the game became pretty much a blur."

The only thing clear to the Flyers players after that was that as the ambulance disappeared in the distance, it took away a guy who was, as Siewe put it, "just effervescent ... a special guy who loved life and made you love it, too."

Life of the party

Dahlinghaus wasn't so much a shooting star as he was a flaming human cannonball.

"It happened during a party in Matt and Smitty's room at Founders Hall," said Chip Bok, a walk-on tailback for the Flyers who today is the editorial cartoonist of the Akron Beacon Journal.

Quinn remembers it: "Matt had read a Sports Illustrated story about Tim Rossovich, the All-American linebacker out of Southern Cal. It told about the crazy things he did — diving through a circle of fire, stuff like that."

Bok said Dahlinghaus didn't think Rossovich's stunts were that spectacular, then told how Matt wet down his arms, then stepped up into the window of the second-floor room he shared with tackle Bob Smith: "He squirted his arms with lighter fluid, set them on fire and then jumped down into the courtyard."

Quinn thinks they put mattresses down first. Siewe said, "I believe he had a pillow on his butt. ... I do remember people hanging out the windows watching. And when Matt lands, he just pops up laughing and yells 'Who's next?' "

There were no takers that night, but Matt's sister, Beth Conway — a UD senior living with five other girls on K Street when Matt came to campus as a freshman — remembers Bok joining him for the navel orange nonsense.

"I still can't believe it," she chuckled. "They came over and told us they could eat these enormous oranges — whole. They shoved them into their mouths — you can't imagine what it looked like — and I'm thinking 'Oh my God, they'll kill themselves.'

"But then they just started chewing and chewing and finally the oranges disappeared. It was hysterical."

Siewe laughed at the old stories:

"Oh yeah, make no mistake, he was a moron's moron. But he was a lot more than that, too. He added something to everybody's life."

Beth agreed: "He was like a little leprechaun playing tricks on everybody. He thought it was such a hoot to make everybody laugh.

"In college I tended to be too serious sometimes, and he just added that extra spark. His fun-loving spirit made you experience things you might not. It reminded you how special things could be with a little frivolity mixed in."

Honoring a teammate

In tackling Miles, Dahlinghaus suffered a compression injury to his neck — he fractured the fifth vertebra — and was left paralyzed.

He was taken to a Toledo hospital, where he remained for some six weeks on a ventilator, fed by tubes, his head stabilized by a cervical halo. With a trachea tube in, he could only communicate by blinking his eyes.

Flyers players — and some from BGSU — visited him in Toledo, but on Dec. 23, with complications setting in, he was flown by helicopter to St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Dayton.

Three days after Christmas, he died of a blood clot in the lungs.

Bok had just gotten back from a trip to Lake Placid, N.Y., when his dad dropped the newspaper on the table in front of him:

"The headline said Matt had died, and that just devastated me. I remember running down the steps and out the door. I just sat on the curb and cried."

Seven years later, Bok — as did Beth and Flyers linebacker Don Dailey — named a son Matt.

In fact, today Matt Bok — former Notre Dame baseball catcher, Los Angeles Dodgers minor-leaguer and Georgetown University coach — turns 28.

This weekend Beth and her husband are bringing their son with them to the UD festivities honoring Matt. It's a way for their boy to further know about the man for whom he's named.

Some 30 players from the early '70s are expected to attend the Flyers' game with Jacksonville at Welcome Stadium on Saturday. There will be tailgating before and a UD Arena gathering after.

Tonight the group will meet on the UD campus for a reception at the Heritage Center and they'll join current Flyers players at one of their team meetings.

"Coach (Mike) Kelly probably will tell his players about Matt," said Quinn, the organizational force behind this weekend. "And I think when it comes to storytelling time around UD football, this is one tale that should be known. Matt Dahlinghaus was no Average Joe. He was a great football player with an even greater zest for life."

And to that, Beth offered up one last tale:

"My sister Sue had a New Year's Eve party and Matt and one of his friends — Tom Flohre, I believe — did their famous dance, The Bulldog. They got down on the floor and their shoulders were back, their rear ends up, and they did this robotic imitation that was hilarious. Matt looked just like a bulldog."

And that brings us back to the gavotte.

Any guy who knows a 17th-century minuet and a fraternity house dog dance has got to be one special guy.

One teammates still remember 35 years later.

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