AROUND THE IVIES: No Ivy Mischief On ‘Day Of Dead’

If one day could serve as a microcosm for the entire college experience, it would be Halloween.

All Hallows Eve provides students the opportunity to create a new identity for themselves and pretend to be whatever they want, regardless of who they were yesterday.

The holiday gives us license to engage in mischief and debauchery with relative impunity for a brief moment before we are confronted once again with the harsh realities of life.

Halloween, like college, is a chance to do regrettable things without actually having to regret them.

There is no such free pass in Ivy League football.

With just seven games of conference play, each Saturday brings a sense of urgency, each win or loss a sense of finality.

We approach the home stretch of the season, and the race for first place in the Ancient Eight is tightening to suffocating proportions.

So while the rest of us get Sweet n’ Nasty, visit Heaven and Hell, and then return to school not much changed, we should have a little sympathy for Harvard and the other Ivy League teams seeking that top spot. We can afford to mess up this weekend.

They can’t.

HARVARD (5-1, 2-1 Ivy) AT DARTMOUTH (0-6, 0-3 Ivy)

It’s Saturday afternoon. You wake up in a strange, unknown place; and judging by the hardwood floor you slept on and the cockroach crawling into your nostril, you come to the vague conclusion that you’re in a River House. Your only memory of Halloween is that the hot gypsy you were dancing with all night went off with that jerk in the cow suit and the faint smell of drying permanent marker indicates that there is probably genitalia drawn somewhere on your person.

Need a pick-me-up? How about this:

Harvard is going to pummel Dartmouth.

Seriously, it’s going to be brutal…satisfyingly brutal. I know I’ve beaten this point to death, but the Big Green is the worst. Not the worst in the Ivy League, not the worst in college football, just the worst.

Prediction: Harvard 41, Dartmouth 13

BROWN (4-2, 3-0 Ivy) AT PENN (4-2, 3-0 Ivy)

This is arguably the most important game of the season for Harvard. Yes, for Harvard.

Only one team will emerge from this contest undefeated in Ivy League play. If you’re a Crimson fan, hope that it’s Penn. The Quakers have a much harder schedule than the Bears after this week, facing Princeton and Cornell on the road, along with Harvard, while Brown’s final slate consists of the disappointing Yale and Ancient Eight bottom-dwellers Dartmouth and Columbia.

If the Crimson sweeps through the rest of the season—a very realistic possibility—a Penn win tomorrow would at least guarantee Harvard a share of the Ivy League championship.

Prediction: Penn 14, Brown 10

COLUMBIA (1-5, 1-2 Ivy) AT YALE (3-3, 1-2 Ivy)

Yale is like the guy dressing up as Borat tonight. The Bulldogs were really cool two years ago. Everyone went up to them screaming “VERY NICE!” and giving them high fives.

Last year, Yale still was in, though losing steam. The Elis had looked like a trend that was never going to get old, but finally the wheels came off and the run was over.

Now, the Ivy League has changed, the competition is better, but Yale is still prancing around in an ugly grey Kazakh journalist suit and a porn star mustache.

Still, while Columbia has impressed me with its toughness and the Lions took care of business against Dartmouth last week, Yale still has a little mileage to get out of its green mankini, especially at home.

Prediction: Yale 24, Columbia 20

PRINCETON (2-4, 1-2 Ivy) AT CORNELL (3-3, 1-2 Ivy)

This is a pretty boring game featuring a pair of mediocre teams, each riding a three-game losing streak. So, in sticking with the Halloween theme, I have made my pick based on which school has the best campus legend featured on its Wikipedia page.

My one and only source for term papers mentions Princeton’s “Phantom of Fine Hall…an obscure, shadowy figure that would infest Fine Hall, home to the Mathematics Department, and write complex equations on blackboards.”

Even if the phantom had turned out to be John Forbes Nash, inventor of the Nash equilibrium, I prefer complex math problems to mysteriously appear thanks to tough yet sensitive MIT janitors from Southie, thank you very much.

Let’s see what Cornell’s got: “If a virgin crosses the Arts Quad at midnight, the statues of Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White will walk off their pedestals, meet in the center of the Quad, and shake hands, congratulating themselves on the chastity of the University.”

Bingo. There’s nothing I can appreciate more than some good old fashioned Ivy League sexual repression.

Prediction: Cornell 24, Princeton 21

Last week: 3-1

Record to Date: 21-7

—Staff writer Loren Amor can be reached at lamor@fas.harvard.edu.