For decades, Brown versus Rhode Island was the only game in town. The smallest state in the nation only had two Division I schools with football programs. Both competed at the I-AA/FCS level. Neither was especially competitive.

Still, these games, forgive the parlance, slapped. Right around the start of the millennium the Ivy League Bears, under the guidance of Phil Estes (who succeeded a Mark Whipple-Don Brown combination, somehow) developed into one of the most exciting teams in the country. Not AA football; anywhere.

In 1998, Brown out-slugged Penn 58-51 in a game that featured 58 (fifty-eight!) fourth-quarter points. The 1999 team won the Ivy League title behind current head coach James Perry, Mike Malan and Steven Campbell. The 2000 team scored at least 28 points in every game.

But the best game in that stretch may have been a 2001 showdown with then-No. 9 Rhode Island where Bears wideout Chas Gessner had 269 receiving yards and three touchdowns and still lost. Rhody ran for 309 yards. Brown passed for 492. It was like watching Ron Dayne’s Wisconsin play Michael Crabtree’s Texas Tech, only everyone kinda sucked at football. It was glorious.

In honor of the quaintest in-state rivalry in college football — Brown season tickets cost $40 for five games in 2001 and came with $20 in concessions vouchers and a long-sleeved tee! — we’re going to drink one of Rhode Island’s proudest traditions.

If you know someone from Rhode Island — or, most likely, are from Rhode Island, since we tend not to leave our motherland; maybe we’ll get to Connecticut or even New Hampshire, but roughly 95 percent of us remain tethered to New England in order to preserve our superiority complex over the rest of the nation — you’re familiar with our extremely localized cuisine.

It’s mostly, for lack of a better word, garbage. Hot weiners. Pizza strips. Clam cakes. Frozen lemonade. Subsisting on any of it for more than a few days at a time should make you ineligible for health insurance.

It is also incredible. Calvitto’s strips, a couple of weiners from Olneyville’s New York System and a Del’s is capable of powering you through any test the world can drop at your feet. So in honor of that cuisine, we’re gonna booze up the official state drink of Rhode Island: coffee milk.

The key ingredient in coffee milk is a syrup endemic to the Ocean State, typically made by either Autocrat (great) or Eclipse (… fine). If you can’t buy it, you can make it — here’s a good-enough looking recipe. Fortunately, I have a backlog of Autocrat that made the trip to the Midwest alongside me, just waiting for a moment like this.

Today we’re making two drinks. Let’s keep it simple for the first. Coffee milk in a white Russian is a no-brainer — it’s basically got all the ingredients anyway. Let’s see if a little taste of Rhody kicks it up a notch.

Good news! This rules. The vodka — Community vodka, which looks like a hotel shampoo bottle but mixed in very well here — is a bit strong but the coffee syrup acts as a built-in chaser to leave the whole thing feeling sweet. It’s smooth and creamy but not overpoweringly sugary. If not for all the dairy,  I could easily put down a couple of these.

Yeah, this one isn’t complicated. Whiskey, milk and syrup, shaken up and poured into a tall glass.

It’s a little harsher than the Autocrat, but Irish whiskey is typically inherently smooth and Keeper’s Heart — which showed up on my doorstep one day and I’d never had before — fits with that tradition. Ultimately if I’m going with a dairy cocktail, I’d prefer the white Russian variant, but I’m not complaining about either of these.

After ruining the Colorado Bulldog last week, I feel like I’ve done coffee milk a solid. That’s about all I could hope for. Being from Rhode Island is all about rising above failure to a tolerable level of mediocrity. And yet, these drinks, particularly the Autocrat, exceeded that.

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