It’s taken longer than 20 years to get this far, and there have been a few fits and starts along the way. But tonight, when St. Mary’s faces Tech at Manning Field, it’ll be the 20th Thanksgiving Eve Classic.Some may scoff ? and let them. This is the story of a school that simply refused, in the end, to be a second-class citizen on the one day of the year when tradition just about defines activity.Ray McDermott, who was the coach in 1985 when the first Thanksgiving Eve Classic between the Spartans and Bishop Fenwick was scheduled for the first time, notes that in the previous 25 years, St. Mary’s bused over to Margin Street in Peabody every Thanksgiving. And that included the years when McDermott played for the Spartans.”We wanted the same thing everyone else already had,” McDermott said. “We wanted to have our Thanksgiving, with our crowd.”It kind of made us feel like nomads,” McDermott said. “You looked around, and said to yourself, ‘Gee, we should be able to have our own game, too.'”The problem? There was already a Thanksgiving Day game at Manning Bowl – Classical against English ? and there was no way anyone was going to mess with that. So, McDermott hit upon the idea of a Wednesday night game.”I wasn’t the first one,” he said. “Malden Catholic, by then, had already established its own Wednesday night tradition (at the time, it was against Don Bosco until the school closed in the late 1990s). So other people were doing it.”It wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to pull off back in those days. For one thing, Fenwick was reluctant to relinquish its yearly competitive advantage at a time when the program was starting to grow. The Crusaders also drew a good crowd at the game, too.But you can’t dam off progress. Come November of 1985, the game was on. With conditions.”I think every time the game was supposed to be here, I was nervous about weather,” McDermott said. “If it even looked like rain, we ran the risk of getting it called off.”Obviously, the city didn’t want the feature game ruined by a chewed-up field caused by a rainy, muddy game the night before (thankfully, we need not worry about that anymore).And, of course, that’s exactly what happened for the first scheduled Classic. It was raw and rainy on that Wednesday night, with snow in the forecast, and Lynn DPW Commissioner Eugene Dooley scrubbed the game until the following Saturday (whereupon Fenwick came to Manning Bowl and won, 11-8, on a field goal in overtime).”It was always a concern,” McDermott said. “I remember one time, Gene walked up to me (in 1987, the next time the game rotated to the bowl) and says, ‘Got some bad news for you.’ He must have seen the look on my face, because he laughed and said, ‘I’m only kidding with you. You’re on.'”The Spartans won that game, and Fenwick came back two years later to win. After that, the series discontinued because St. Mary’s joined the Commonwealth Conference and picked up Tech as an opponent. However, it wasn’t until 1994 that the game – which had been merely another regular-season game prior to that – was moved to Thanksgiving Eve, resuming the Classic. And it’s been a worthy table-setter ever since. In some years, especially as the Bowl’s demise rapidly hastened, the night game was more a more popular draw than the Classical-English game. Even now, with the brand-new facility, there’s always a healthy crowd there.Instituting a tradition isn’t the only thing McDermott can take credit for at St. Mary’s. He took over a program that had pretty much come close to hitting bottom, and had to teach it to walk before it could run.The late Ed McElligott, the legendary voice of Manning Bowl throughout that era, told The Item at the time that “The numbers (were) always against them ? but Ray (taught) his St. Mary’s kids the right way to play the game.”The program has since soared to great heights. It won a Division 3A Super Bowl in 2005, and, these days, is in the capable hands of coach Matt Durgin.But if you go to tonight’s game