It’s hard to grab even a quick meal without seeing someone you know at The Tombs, where the faces are as familiar as the memorabilia and vintage crew equipment adorning the walls.

But if the crowd at Georgetown’s neighborhood bar and restaurant seems especially static at this time of year, it’s probably because of 99 Days, The Tombs’ frequent-customers club that for some has become a rite of passage on the Hilltop.

Each spring, 99 Days offers seniors a proposition: Make a purchase at The Tombs every day for the last 99 days before graduation, and your name will be engraved on a plaque for future generations of barflies to gaze upon.

If it sounds like the perfect marketing maneuver, it is: Roughly 300 people sign up for the club each year, and 200 make it through the full eight weeks and one day of the contest to achieve gold-plated glory on graduation day.

For those seniors who sign up, 99 Days, now in its 10th year, offers a chance to bond with classmates in their final weeks as undergrads at the Georgetown hangout that regulars liken to the Cheers bar, the place where everybody knows your name (or, at least, has seen your Facebook profile).

“It’s like a relationship that survived the honeymoon stage right now,” said Eric Lightfoot (SFS ’08) of his daily obligation to The Tombs. At the very least, he said, signing up for 99 Days gave him a free T-shirt and an excuse to go out with his friends.

Management at The Tombs has long resisted the notion that the club is simply a ploy to boost its profits through student drinking. Paul Jay Miller Jr., the restaurant’s executive manager, noted that students were instrumental in creating 99 Days, and keep signing up year after year.

“We do it because they want to do it,” Miller said. “We don’t do it for us to make money.”

He added that participating students receive credit for any purchase they make at The Tombs, and need not buy alcohol. Many participants come in for lunch or Study Snacks, The Tombs’ low-priced afternoon fare, he said.

But 99 Days has evolved markedly since its beginnings in 1999, when it launched with the express intention of attracting more customers. Seth Meehan (COL ’99), who came up with the idea, said he was approached during his senior year by Tombs management seeking to bring back students who had left The Tombs for other bars and campus parties.

Meehan suggested the idea of a drinking club for seniors, a proposal he had heard of from a cousin. The club would require 99 days of straight attendance — an homage to the Class of ’99 — to bring in customers and encourage more fraternity among the graduating class. For The Tombs, “the 99 Days Club was kind of a reminder that, you know, we’re here,” Meehan said.

And in its earliest days, at least, 99 Days was very much a drinking club: Participants were required to buy a drink, or perhaps a soda, each day. (Shots, too quick and antisocial to contribute to a convivial bar atmosphere, didn’t count.)

“It wasn’t a sit-down-and-have-a-sandwich thing,” Meehan said.

The first year, news of the club spread largely by word of mouth, but Meehan said that enough seniors signed on to make the program a success. All in all, 41 seniors made it through to the end in the inaugural year.

Since then, the program has grown expansively. Its most successful year was in 2000, but participation has remained steady since then, as more and more seniors sign on to the idea that you can’t have too much of a good thing.

For many seniors, the story of how they became interested in 99 Days starts the same whay: All of their friends were doing it. Bob Scully (COL ’08) said that he and his three roommates signed up together, though two of them have since dropped out.

As the program grew over the years, it also changed. The management began to loosen the rules, eventually opening up the entire Tombs menu to club members.

Miller noted that The Tombs has also done away with the requirement that students who miss a day make up for it with an “open-to-close,” and stay at The Tombs throughout its entire hours of operation. The staff is developing a Tombs trivia test that will be issued to students who miss a day, Miller said.

The club is no longer even exclusive to Georgetown seniors, according to Harrison Beacher (COL ’08), a waiter at The Tombs who is also participating in 99 Days. Beacher said that several Tombs regulars from American University and George Washington University have signed up.

Even as The Tombs has relaxed the requirements of 99 Days, plenty of regular Tombs-trawling seniors opt out of the club. Ashley Sampson (SFS ’08), who lives in Burleith and says she goes to The Tombs approximately twice a week, felt she lived too far away from The Tombs to make the trek there every day.

“If I lived on that side of campus, I probably would have done it,” Sampson said.

Some of those in the club, now nearly two months into their commitment to daily Tombs visits, admit that the repetition can get a bit tedious.

“There’s a couple of times that I’m like, ‘Oh, I don’t really want to go,’ said Scully, who lives a block behind campus in Burleith.

“People are hysterical about it, they’re self-critical,” said Beacher, who says he eats three to four meals a week at The Tombs. “But they come back.”

And, although Miller maintains that many students in the club satisfy their 99 Days requirement without drinking, several members noted that drinking might be a better option for the financially conscious: A mug of Busch Lite is less expensive than a soda at The Tombs. On a college student’s budget, 99 days of anything tends to add up.

“I can say right now that I spend too much money at The Tombs,” Lightfood said.

Still, even as the rules have changed and some remain skeptical, most seniors end up joining for many of the same reasons that the club was started 10 years ago.

Miller noted that 99 Days has already become a Georgetown tradition in its own right, and a point of pride for those alumni who finish the contest.

“They always want to show their name on the plaque to their friends or family,” he said.

Meehan is living proof: He and his Georgetown-girlfriend-turned-wife recently returned to The Tombs with their newborn daughter, and he’s been pleased to see how the club has continued.

More than anything else, perhaps, 99 Days has solidified The Tombs’s status as the ultimate college bar and an institution as dear to Hoyas as Healy Hall.

“The whole point of 99 Days is just ... going to The Tombs and hanging out with your friends,” said Mariclaire Petty (SFS ’08), who was prevented from signing up for the club by a bad case of the flu and three papers that week. “I still go to The Tombs a lot; it’s nice not feeling like I have to.”