Matt Campbell and K.C. Keeler meet for the first time as head coaches. The two once took part in a historic D-III playoff game.

Mount Union was facing a fourth-and-5 in overtime, trailing 24-17 in a Division III playoff semifinal game on Dec. 11, 1999. The Purple Raiders, down to their last play, held a 54-game winning streak, then the longest in any division of football, and sought a fourth straight trip to the D-III title game, named the Stagg Bowl.

Twenty-seven years later, K.C. Keeler still can see the play crystal-clear. Back then, he was Rowan’s head football coach, seeking his fourth title game appearance since becoming a 32-year-old head coach in 1993. And on this day, after losing to Mount Union in the championship game twice in the previous three years, something special was about to unfold for the Profs.

“I remember the last play of the game, [Mount Union was] going to try to tie it up on fourth down, and they had a tight end, I believe it was, over the middle of the field, in the end zone, and the ball’s thrown,” Keeler, now Temple’s coach, recalled to The Inquirer. “I see the tight end go up in the air, and it looks like he’s going to come down with it. And Mark Hendricks, my middle linebacker, who was a two-time captain for me, he turns and runs and actually hits the tight end so hard he broke his ribs. And the ball comes squirting out, and he’s laying there, and we’re celebrating over top of him.

“My 398th game [is] coming up here. … That was definitely one of those where you remember for a lifetime.”

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On the surface, Penn State head coach Matt Campbell, from Massillon, Ohio, and Keeler, from Emmaus, Pa., don’t share many commonalities beyond coaching in the same state ahead of their matchup on Saturday (noon, ESPN2). As it turns out, though, the 46-year-old Campbell, a former standout college defensive end turned coach, was not only on that Mount Union team in 1999, but on the field toward the end of the game.

At a coaching clinic this winter, not long after Campbell became Penn State’s 17th football coach, Keeler says his counterpart had one thing on his mind to bring up after formally meeting.

“First thing that comes out of [Campbell’s mouth], he goes, ‘I’m 1-1 against you.’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean you’re 1-1? You’re 0-1,’” Keeler says. “He goes, ‘No, I was a [graduate assistant] on the team that beat you then a couple years later.’

“It’s like, ‘OK, we’ll give you that one.’ So he and Nick Sirianni were both on that team [in 1999], and I’ve had some fun with them on having that one up on them, for sure.”

Campbell, who quipped, “You’re kind of coming at me, huh?” when The Inquirer asked about that 1999 game against Rowan earlier this week, still harbors feelings over the only loss in his college career at Mount Union.

“In that game, as a football player [who] won three national championships, and at that time, that was almost the spark for our program, to be quite honest with you,” Campbell said from his podium on Tuesday. “I was in on the last play, as the game ended, and that was tough.

“I think for me, that was a great opportunity for me to learn what the standard of excellence was in the program at Mount Union losing that football game, and what it meant to never have that feeling again.”

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That 1999 game comes into focus as Keeler, now in his 33rd season as a head coach, will host in-state rival Penn State this weekend. It will mark the 46th meeting all-time between the programs.

And the significance of Rowan’s win still reverberates with some of Keeler’s former players almost three decades later.

Bobby Acosta, who played for Keeler at Rowan as a safety, lost his father as a freshman and left school without telling his coach. He later changed his mind, but the only way back on the football team, Keeler told him, was if Acosta “got a 4.0 [GPA] and passed 18 credit hours in the summer.”

“I said to myself, ‘There’s no way I can do that,’ and I did it. And that’s where my life changed,” said Acosta, who now coaches high school football in Texas. “I was a young man. K.C. was like my dad. Ever since that point, I played for him. Then I worked for him at Rowan. Then I worked for him at Delaware with Joe Flacco.

“He’s been a mentor to me for a lot of years. It was to the point I was babysitting his kids when I was in college. K.C. Keeler to me was someone that I looked up to.”

Greg Gudis, who was the starting left guard for Rowan during the 1999 season, took a different route to the program. He initially chose Gettysburg College out of Pennsauken High School, started as a freshman, but noticed the program “didn’t really prioritize” football.

So Gudis transferred to Rowan, formerly named Glassboro State, in 1998, located “right in my backyard,” he said. The former offensive lineman appreciated that Keeler was honest and did not guarantee him a starting spot.

“When I got to Rowan, the level of talent was so much higher than where I just come from,” said Gudis, who now resides in Arizona. “Some of the guys I played against that maybe should have been [playing at the Division I level]. It was a much different level of play, and Coach Keeler was a much different level of coach than where I had just come from.”

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Two things remained elusive for Keeler heading into Rowan’s 1999 season: Beating Mount Union and winning a Stagg Bowl, both of which he went winless three times prior.

The 67-year-old coach, leading up to Rowan’s playoff matchup with Mount Union, made sure to keep newspaper clippings out of the locker room, said Gudis. Acosta added that the more than six-hour trip to Alliance, Ohio, where Mount Union was located, had the team “already down 20 points mentally,” but their mindset was “we have everything to gain and nothing to lose at their home place.”

And it worked. Though Rowan lost to Pacific Lutheran the following week in the Stagg Bowl, that win over Mount Union was “our national championship that day,” Acosta said.

“You almost wanted to win for Coach Keeler because number one, you respect him as a great coach, but number two, it’s like this guy knows nothing but losing [to] Mount Union,” Gudis said. ”And it was like, ‘Wow, I’m sure we probably finally brought some closure to that book for him to say I got over the hump.’"

Added Keeler: “My wife always says that life’s about the moments, and one of my messages is always be in the moment, and that very much was the message when we played Mount Union. … Just keep on playing to the very end, and when you have really good teams, that’s what they do.”

When Penn State and Temple play at the Linc for the first time since 2015, which ended in a historic win for the Owls that springboarded an unbelievable two-year run, Keeler will be thinking of the teams that came before him. There’s a reminder every day of that 2015 game in the program’s facilities. The four team captains from the 2016 American Conference champion team will be recognized on Saturday.

He also recognizes the challenge that lies ahead. Penn State, Keeler believes, has a chance to be a top 10 team, similar to Oklahoma last year, another Power Four team who came to the Linc to play Temple. Keeler added that Campbell will “do amazing things” during his time at Penn State.

The respect is reciprocal.

“[I have] a lot of respect for Coach Keeler, what he did [at Rowan], what that team was about,” Campbell said. “It was a physical football game [in 1999], and similar to what you expect to see on Saturday, a physical, well-coached football team that has done a great job putting any program he’s been at in a position to play great football.”

While Campbell tips his cap to Keeler’s career success, including winning FCS national championships at Delaware and Sam Houston State, the Temple coach credits his first head coaching gig being at the core of it all.

“Those years formed who I am now as a coach,” Keeler said. “[We] had a team meeting to go to before I left [for Delaware in 2002] and I walked into that team meeting, I get a standing ovation and at that point I realized because I had talked about my Delaware experiences so much that those guys knew that they got me that job and they were proud that they got me that job and then I realized for the first time, ‘Oh my God!’ I’m leaving a group of kids that were OK with me leaving because it was my dream job.

“Rowan was a special place. They gave me an opportunity, they took a chance on me … obviously things worked out pretty well there.”