Are you blue? Or do you turn green when it’s UAAP basketball season?

There are other colors on the wheel of course, but blue and green are the ones that have defined the fiercest rivalry in local high school and college athletics. Having first skirmished in the NCAA, the Ateneo Blue Eagles and the La Salle Green Archers have brought their battles and their fans to the UAAP and the rest, as they say, is history, if not hysteria.

Sensing a win-win opportunity in this tradition of contempt between Ateneo de Manila University and De La Salle University, global sports giant adidas recently signed up the two teams to a three-year contract that gives it the exclusive right—and bragging rights—to produce, co-brand and sell Ateneo and La Salle varsity jackets, polo shirts, graphic tees, and accessories. To highlight the collections, adidas has also come out with basketball shoes.

The respective collections are displayed in opposing setups at adidas concept stores in TriNoma, Greenhills, Rockwell, Alabang Town Center, Festival Mall and Megamall. Outside Metro Manila, they are available at stores in places where there are Ateneo or La Salle campuses.

Believing that “impossible is nothing,” adidas had actually initiated the co-branding last year with AdMU. The superb sales inspired adidas to woo rival team DLSU and add fire and brimstone to the famed feuding.

Talks between Joseph Edward “Joey” Singian, adidas managing director, and Bro. Armin Luistro, DLSU-Manila president and chancellor, yielded approval of the partnership, but only after the sports company agreed to La Salle’s stringent trademark requirements. It might have helped that Singian, an Ateneo management engineering graduate, has a touch of green tucked somewhere in his CV. “I was in the last batch of La Salle-Taft grade school,” he admits.

Adidas executives also had to be in constant consultation with the two schools for inputs on the design and manufacture of the merchandise. “Templates had to be approved,” adds Singian. “And everything had to be tabla (even) between the two teams.”

Adidas sweetened the deal by sponsoring all the teams of the two schools in the UAAP, not just the hoop teams. “Including the women’s teams,” emphasizes Singian. This means AdMU and DLSU athletes in 15 sports this season, not just the more popular events like basketball, badminton, baseball, swimming and volleyball, are all wearing uniforms and shoes from adidas, with the possible exception of players whose individual contracts with other sportswear labels predate the adidas deal.

“So many people have expressed appreciation for this campaign,” says Singian.

This isn’t surprising at all. For one thing, the Archers vs Eagles game is always a much-awaited event for the simple reason that the two schools are the only honest-to-goodness rivals in local sports. There is no rivalry, not even in the PBA, that can share equal billing with this collegiate contest that often breaks attendance records at the Araneta Coliseum.

For another, a Blue Eagles vs Green Archers game is always worth the ticket price. No matter if one of the teams (usually Ateneo) is having an off-year, both play their darndest when matched against each other. As a former Eagles coach says, if you’re a player or a coach on either team and you don’t wake up on D-Day raring to go for the kill, you’ve got to be missing a pulse—and you better stay home.

And then there are the alumni, those lunatics who think they can play better than the players and coach better than the coaches yet lavish their teams with undying love and loyalty, not to mention money. Many of them are now team captains of their own industries. As the New York Times story last year noted, every Archers vs Eagles game is a reunion attended by the wealthiest and most powerful in the country.

For the alumni, beating the Enemy is more important than the team’s season record. After an Ateneo-La Salle game, they want to be able to show up at the office the next morning feeling triumphant. They want to be able to gloat online. They want bragging rights, period.

With the two teams on almost equal footing this season, and with the fans praying for a face-off in this year’s UAAP championship, sales of the basketball merchandise have been pretty good.

Young Atenistas and Lasalistas are pushing and pulling their parents into adidas showrooms to get them jerseys that they can wear to the games, specially the second-round AdMU vs DLSU match on Sept. 6. Students wear what they buy right there and then, notes Odette Alcantara, adidas marketing communications manager. As for the coeds, they are loving it that they don’t need to have jock boyfriends to get their hands on varsity jackets. Consider too the staggering number of Ateneo and La Salle alumni (the former has been in existence for 149 years and the latter, 97 years) and their families who have to dress in blue or green.

So will adidas sell more Ateneo or more La Salle branded merchandise? It all depends on whether, after so many years of hardcourt hatred, the glory of the rivalry is still there.

“The two teams have become more respectful toward each other,” observes Singian. “Their reps meet and talk to each other more often than in the past.”

Respect is good and talking is fine, but too much respect and talking may lead to friendship and that will be too bad for the teams, the fans, the league, the coliseum, even the nation. Don’t these people know how lonely and boring it is to go to a school—or through life—without a rival?

Fear not, says Goody Custodio, adidas sports marketing manager, because the animosity is intense as ever. For his own safety, Custodio wears a custom-made adidas shirt to the games. One side is blue and the other, green.