It happened. I don't know if it was a spontaneous act of celebration as some Michigan State players contend or a vengeful "take that" copied off Notre Dame's antics the previous year. Whatever the case, Michigan State planted a flag at Notre Dame Stadium last year and it's time to get over it.

Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis rekindled Flag-gate last week after his Irish were beaten raw by Michigan, saying "there's one incident in particular that I'll use as motivation" for this Saturday's game against MSU.

Even if he hadn't, ABC, judging by its promos, would have made it a major deal of it, and all of us beat reporters would have followed suit with witty flag references tucked inside too many inches of copy. But you want to know the truth about Flag-gate? It really wasn't that big of a deal.

Michigan State scored the winning touchdown in overtime of last year's game to cap a dramatic finish, then went to its corner of the end zone and sang its fight song with its fans. On the way to the locker room, Eric Smith jabbed the flag into some turf near midfield and a few other Spartans danced around it in glee.

No Notre Dame player was there to defend the honor of the sacred ground that was violated by the flag plant, and no one made much noise about it until the next day, when footage of the hateful act began circulating on TV. Notre Dame players then said they didn't appreciate MSU's antics, and MSU said so what, we won.

Now, there are rumors that Weis told some of his boosters he'll make sure Notre Dame never loses to Michigan State again. Another big whoop in my opinion - what's he supposed to say, we'll be lucky to beat those guys? - but one MSU is using as counter bulletin-board material to offset any edge the Irish might have gained from the flag.

Weis denied making any such comments at his press conference Tuesday, saying he doesn't talk to anybody in the summer time except his wife.

"Here's what I think we have to do," Weis said. "We have to put the flag incident behind us because when you use something like the flag incident and try to use it as our motivation for the game, that lasts for about five minutes once the game starts. Once you start hitting each other in the mouth a few times in the game that stuff is over with. You can use all sorts of quotes and things on the board to get you through the week, but the bottom line is we need to play better and we need to play better than we did last week or we'll lose again this week."