COMEBACK OF THE YEAR: Football 35, Brown 34

For the Crimson faithful, the lasting image of the 2005 Harvard football team will be the team and fans storming the Harvard Stadium field following the Crimson’s 35-3 dismantling of Yale to complete the 10-0 perfect season.

For the players and coaches, the enduring memory will be from two months earlier—just minutes into the Ivy season. On Sept. 25 against Brown in Providence, Harvard played the worst 30 minutes of football a team could put together.

The first half against the Bears was a confluence of disasters for the Crimson. The defense gave up 31 points and allowed an astounding 451 yards to a merely average Brown offense. The offense could only muster a quiet 10 points and failed to hold onto the ball long enough to give its beleaguered defense a rest. At the break, Harvard trailed by 21 points. The run at the Ivy League championship looked like it was going to end before it even started.

And then there was halftime.

“It was probably my best sports moment of all time,” said captain Ryan Fitzpatrick of the intermission. “The feeling that, with all the seniors in there, pouring their hearts out to each other, and trying to get everybody fired up.”

“Even at halftime we had the feeling that we would win this game,” senior safety Ricky Williamson added. “We were confident.”

Whatever happened during the 15 minutes the Crimson spent in the cramped locker room underneath the Brown Stadium bleachers—whatever was said, whatever adjustments were made—saved the season.

Harvard took the field in the second half and looked nothing like the dejected team that lumbered off the field at the end of the second quarter.

Fitzpatrick immediately took charge of his team and, after the Crimson fielded the opening kick, directed the offense downfield in a drive that culminated in a 35-yard touchdown pass to sophomore wide receiver Corey Mazza.

Then the defense that could not slow the Bears’ attack through the first 30 minutes of play stopped Brown in three quick plays.

Three possessions later, after sophomore Dylan McCrory forced the Bears’ Rashad Collins to muff a punt and Harvard converted the miscue into a field goal, the Crimson offense got the ball back trailing by 11 and let sophomore running back Clifton Dawson take over.

From his own 20-yard line, Dawson took a handoff from Fitzpatrick, found a hole in the line, broke through a couple of tackles in the Brown secondary, and raced free down the right side of the field for an 80-yard touchdown run.

On the following two-point conversion, Fitzpatrick kept the ball and dove into the end zone. All of a sudden, the Bears’ lead was down to three.

“We knew—especially the seniors, the guys up in the offensive front—we knew, that in that second half we needed to score at least four touchdowns, three touchdowns, to keep us in the game,” Fitzpatrick said after the game.

From that point on, there was little doubt that the Crimson would find a way to win.

Harvard completed the comeback when Dawson took an option pitch from Fitzpatrick and ran for a one-yard touchdown. The Crimson had a 35-31 lead.

Brown would add a field goal to pull within one, but would miss a crucial last-minute field-goal attempt to seal the Harvard victory.

“That game was gut-check time for us,” Williamson said, “on the verge of a loss and for us surmounting the unthinkable and coming back.”

Dawson finished the game with 142 yards and three touchdowns, and further established himself as the preeminent back in the Ivy League—if not all of Division I-AA.

Fitzpatrick followed his “best sports moment of all time” with perhaps his best performance of all time. His 263 yards passing don’t measure up to some of his more prodigious passing games, but the leadership he provided in the second half can hardly be quantified.

“Although it was really early in the season, [the Brown game] probably was the biggest turning point in the year,” Fitzpatrick said. “If we would’ve lost that game a lot would have changed.”

Instead, Fitzpatrick and the Crimson pulled out a victory that propelled them on to a perfect season.

The defensive secondary that had been torched by the Bears’ passing attack found a swagger in the second half that it wouldn’t lose for the rest of year, and the offense proved that it could perform under the highest-pressure situations.

After the game, an emotionally exhausted coach Tim Murphy summed up the remarkable comeback: “We have one adage we live by, and as corny as some people think it is, it’s, ‘Never, ever give up.’”

—Staff writer David H. Stearns can be reached at stearns@fas.harvard.edu.