It was a Saturday. In fact, the Saturday.

Almost exactly a century ago, on 25 September 1926, Henry Ford instituted a policy of weekends for his workforce. Although various labor campaigns had existed for decades to try to carve out what we now call the weekend, this was the first widespread adoption.

It caught on, buoyed by portraits of leisure gracing the covers of the Saturday Evening Post, drawn by an idealistic young artist from New York named Norman Rockwell. In 1929, Walt Disney leveraged Saturday matinees of his animated films to launch The Mickey Mouse Club. On Saturday 25 June 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, formalizing the weekend as federal policy.

Beyond workplace respite, the weekend began to form its own identity. In 1944, Frank Sinatra popularized Saturday as “the loneliest night of the week, because that’s the night my sweetie and I used to dance cheek-to-cheek”. And the 1948 lyrics to Tennessee Saturday Night blared: “Civilized people live there alright, but they all go native on a Saturday night.”

The postwar boom of suburban pleasures transformed weekends into an anchor of indulgence. Sábado Gigante in 1962. Saturday morning cartoons in 1963. The launch of TGIFriday’s as a singles bar in 1965. Super Bowl Sunday in 1967. And a banner year, 1969, saw the moon landing on a Sunday followed by a weekend of Woodstock.

Then, with a frenzy typical of the 1970s, a rapid-fire pop culture trifecta: Saturday Night Live in 1975, Saturday Night Fever in 1977, and Norma Jean Wright’s disco hit Saturday in 1978. All capped by the sloppy onslaught of brunch chaos.

Weekend vibes seemed unstoppable.

But it all began to come undone – not least thanks to an insidious boast from Jerry Reynolds, a guard-forward on Louisiana State University’s basketball team, printed in Sports Illustrated in November 1983; he is........

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