Saved by the Bell: Their Own National Championship

Quick, grab your program. Flip to the page with the rosters. You want to know who’s providing you with this moment, because right now you have no idea. It isn’t any of the numbers you’ve got memorized—it’s not 16 or 19 or 22 or 72—and nothing about the player on the field before you seems particularly distinctive.

You don’t even know what year the player is. Any signs that could definitively set an 18-year-old apart from someone who’s 22 are obscured by the million-megawatt grin across his face, a facial feature that screams eight, nine years old or thereabouts. He could be a senior, doing this for the last time. Or he could be a freshman and maybe not quite know what all this means, except a little more partying later on that night.

And it’s tough to really get a sense of who he is by what he’s saying, since hundreds of people are milling around and a few dozen of them are also uniformed, wearing the same enthusiasm, and it’s easy to lose one person in the morass.

What you do know about the guy is that he’s grinning ear-to-ear, getting his picture taken with ‘Harvard 20, Yale 13’ still up on the scoreboard—and he has only played a couple more minutes of Harvard football this season than you have.

Tailgates aside, is there any better part of The Game than that point immediately after both teams have met at the contest’s conclusion and everyone reaches for as many ways to drink in the memory as possible?

It doesn’t matter if you’ve caught for 1,000 yards or never lined up in a meaningful situation. The season and its concerns—who will start at quarterback next week, who’s hurt, who’s going to break what record—vanish in a sea of humanity. A slowly churning sea, perhaps, seeing as Harvard Stadium’s high walls don’t provide the best storming environment, but an enjoyable one even still.

Right now, the Ivy League doesn’t allow its teams to participate in the Division I-AA playoffs. It is a rule that seems foolish, considering that virtually every other sport can go deep into the postseason.

Now perhaps there is something more corrupting about the Harvard football team playing McNeese State after Thanksgiving than the women’s hockey team going deep into NCAAs or Penn basketball becoming America’s sleeper pick every March. But there certainly is a double-standard, one that has no apparent benefit.

No benefit, that is, except that you’ll always know that Harvard-Yale will be the final game on the schedule. Neil Rose, whose career ended on Saturday, has gone on record numerous times as saying that he’d love to have played in the postseason. But in the absence of that opportunity, he has also called The Game “our national championship.”

Maybe there’s something to be said for having the chance to end every season with a national-championship flavor. I’ve never seen a truly bad season, as Harvard football has been very competitive during my time here. But I can’t help but think that life could be breathed into even the worst season with the prospect of ending it with a win over the Bulldogs.

Of course, this argument provides a poor justification for the ban if one looks anywhere beyond this particular rivalry. Brown-Columbia and Princeton-Dartmouth—two other season-ending clashes that took place on Saturday—don’t exactly carry similar traditional or historical weight.

And there is probably a large majority of Harvard football players who would do anything for the opportunity to stay on the field another few weeks, play the sport they love and prove something about Ivy League football to the rest of the nation. And who can blame them?

But there is something to be said about always having a 50-50 shot to end the season victorious in the only Game that matters.

—Staff writer Martin S. Bell can be reached at msbell@fas.harvard.edu.