DULUTH, Minn.--At first, you don't really notice them.

They are hardly over-whelming--little yellow signs, maybe a foot square that read "UMD I" in crude maroon letters.

They are the kind of little signs you might slap together at home a few minutes before a big hockey game to wave between periods.

The UMD I placards are not just waved between periods of hockey games here. These little signs are on everything in Duluth.

Every business downtown has at least one, maybe three or four. Private homes have them. They are taped to the rear windows of half the cars in town.

You half expect people to have them strapped to their pets.

There are 130,000 people land who knows how many dogs) in the Duluth. Minn., Superior, Wise metropolitan area, so there must be at least 130,000 signs.

The city also has its share of bigger and more intricate signs and banners strewn about. Anything you want with UMD scrawled on it is yours here--for a price.

Dealing in UMD merchandise is big business.

Almost nothing has succeeded in Duluth over the past three or four years. A once great port, which sent the resources of the Iron Range to the rest of the world via the massive are boats that ply Lake Superior, has faded.

Ten thousand people fled the city in the last couple of years.

There is not much to brag about here.

Except the Bulldogs.

At the very top of the page in a sea of red, the headline in today's News-Tribune A Herald is: "Harvard a classy foe for 'Dogs."

The series doesn't start for two days and the Dogs are front-page news.