The year: 1937. Texas Christian University’s Sammy Baugh, who would later become one of professional football’s first Hall of Famers, led his team to victory over Marquette in Dallas’ inaugural Cotton Bowl game.

More than seven decades later — on Dec. 17 — Baugh died, two weeks short of the final Cotton Bowl Classic to be played in its namesake stadium, which he first sanctified as one of college football’s great shrines.

Such weighty history permeated Friday’s AT&T Cotton Bowl Classic between Texas Tech and Ole Miss. Next year, the game will be contested 20 miles west in the Dallas Cowboys’ new, yet-to-be-named stadium.

And while the new facility will offer fans amenities that would have been fantasy in the late 1930s — a retractable roof, field-length video boards, luxury boxes — separating the Cotton Bowl game from the Cotton Bowl is cause for mourning.

“These stadiums … they breathe, they’re almost spiritual. The Cotton Bowl certainly has that,” said Steve Cockerham, who drove from Hattiesburg, Miss.,  with his wife, Mary Ann, to cheer on Ole Miss from their front-row end zone seats.

Their team rewarded their travels with a 47-34 victory over Tech, which earlier this season vied for the nation’s No. 1 ranking. Jevan Snead of Stephenville — like Baugh, a homegrown Texas quarterback — threw for 292 yards and three touchdowns to lead the Rebels past the Red Raiders.

“It won’t be the same in Arlington. You can’t go build or re-create this scene,” said James Esquivel of Dallas, who brought his 8-year-old son, Wyatt, to Friday’s game. It was Wyatt’s first Cotton Bowl game, and his father’s fourth.

Esquivel didn’t have any connection to the two teams playing — he’s a University of Texas fan — but said he wanted to attend the final game in part because his father-in-law played for the Southern Methodist University teams that used the Cotton Bowl stadium for home games in the 1950s.

Indeed, nostalgia abounded, Friday’s game beckoning heroes from Cotton Bowls past to the Fair Park stadium for a final time. A black banner, painted between the field’s 35-yard lines as if marking a grave site, appropriately announced, “1937-2009, Celebrating 73 Years.” The words, “Thank you Cotton Bowl for the Classic Memories,” shined from the stadium’s scoreboard as the teams left the confetti-covered field.

Paying his respect was Kris Haines, who caught the winning touchdown pass from Joe Montana in the 1979 Cotton Bowl as Notre Dame beat Houston. He attended a Cotton Bowl game for the first time since his fateful catch, even sitting for an on-field interview with Fox, which broadcast the game.

And who sat calling the game in the broadcast booth for Fox? The all-but-retired Pat Summerall, 78, who broadcast his first Cotton Bowl game in 1964.

The Cotton Bowl stadium, Summerall said in 2006 upon announcing his part-time return to broadcasting after a liver transplant, ranks as one of the “most storied venues in all of sports.”

Brad Sham is apt to agree.

As the longtime voice of the Cotton Bowl game for radio network Westwood One, Sham said he “hopes the players are able to look back someday and appreciate the significance. Because it is a significant moment for the landscape of sports, and it’s truly the end of an era.”

Tech defensive back Jamar Wall, for one, is unlikely to forget the stadium’s legacy: Members of his family snapped pictures in front of Fair Park’s Hall of State two hours before the game started.

“It’s a great close-out for him, his team, the school and history,” said Wall’s mother, Georgia, who drove in with Jamar Wall’s father and uncle from Plainview, Texas.

Sham, however, rejects the notion that the Cotton Bowl game’s history will somehow be tarnished when the game is played in Arlington.

“The Cotton Bowl Classic is going to be bigger and better than ever,” said Sham, who has also broadcast Cowboys games since the mid-1970s. “There’s great tradition in the Cotton Bowl stadium, but it can’t do the job anymore. The original stadium has been passed by time. The game’s tradition will come with it to Arlington.”

John Crawford concurs. He is the son-in-law of Cotton Bowl game founder J. Curtis Sanford, and was chairman of the Cotton Bowl Athletic Association during the mid-1990s.

Mr. Crawford notes that at the climate-controlled stadium in Arlington, the Cotton Bowl game will compete for inclusion in the NCAA’s elite Bowl Championship Series, through which it could conceivably host a national championship game.

“The location changes, but the game’s impact does not. Ultimately, the move is going to help the game considerably,” Mr. Crawford said as he looked down upon the Cotton Bowl field from the stadium’s upper deck.

That the AT&T Cotton Bowl Classic is exiting the Cotton Bowl stadium is about the only certainty surrounding the facility’s future as a bowl venue.

City officials are angling to attract another bowl-level game to the Cotton Bowl, which just underwent a nearly $50 million renovation and seating expansion but has failed to attract other top-shelf college football games to complement the annual Texas-OU and Grambling-Prairie View A&M contests.

Whether that’s an existing bowl game or a new one altogether is unknown, as is the full fate of the Cotton Bowl name itself: City officials say they have no plans to rename the Cotton Bowl stadium, and AT&T Cotton Bowl Classic directors say they have no intentions of changing the game’s name. This curious conundrum raises the specter of two bowl games, both involving the Cotton Bowl name, being played 20 miles from each other, within days of one another.

But no matter the stadium, no matter what it’s named, the names of Sanford and Field “Mr. Cotton Bowl” Scovell, of Montana and Roger Staubach, and of Summerall and Baugh, persist.

“You think about it,” Sham said, “and there’s a certain kind of symmetry to the game moving on right after the passing of the game’s first outstanding player.”

dlevinthal@dallasnews.com; norrism@dallasnews.com