Another Win Under the Lights

Friday Night Lights.

Many of the players on Harvard’s football team spent their high school years living for it—the roar of the hometown crowd, the pride in hauling in the winning catch, the simple love of the game.

And though in Ivy League football, the focus is shifted to Saturday afternoons in sparsely-filled stadiums, for one night a year, the Crimson gets to take a trip down memory lane.

“Playing under the lights on Friday night reminds you a lot of high school football,” said Harvard junior quarterback Collier Winters. “It takes you back a little bit.”

On Friday, Harvard took the field for the third annual night game at Harvard Stadium. And for the third time, the Crimson came away with the win.

In 2007, against Brown, Harvard took control with a late first-half touchdown and never looked back, riding out a 24-17 win.

In 2008, with Holy Cross in town for the season opener, the Crimson found itself down, 24-12, with less than 10 minutes to play.

But quarterback Chris Pizzotti ’08-’09 took matters into his own hands, orchestrating two drives to the endzone and taking the ball himself twice to give the home fans a thrilling 25-24 win.

In the vein of last year’s comeback, Friday’s game had some drama of its own. But this time, it was the Bears threatening to erase a 10-point deficit in the game’s final minute.

After Brown’s star receiver Bobby Sewall brought down a touchdown pass with 34 seconds to play, Harvard fumbled away the ensuing onside kick, and a win that had seemed signed, sealed, and delivered just minutes before was suddenly in jeopardy.

On the last three plays of the game, new Bears quarterback Kyle Newhall-Caballero sought his favorite target—Sewall—at the right side of the endzone, hoping for another miracle touchdown.

But with the home crowd roaring behind it, the Crimson’s secondary held strong, with seniors Ryan Barnes and Jon Takamura batting away the last two passes to preserve the 24-21 victory.

Three games. Three wins. And the common thread?

Perhaps the lights make everything appear clearer to Harvard’s signal callers. Maybe the Crimson defense simply operates better after 7 p.m. But chances are, it probably has a little bit to do with the crowd.

Friday’s attendance was estimated at 17,263—thousands more than come out to any Harvard game against an opponent not from New Haven.

And a large number of those were rowdy, inebriated students—certainly a departure from most Saturday afternoons, when very few Crimson Crazies actually make it across the river for the game.

The night game has become a regular fixture in the fall social scene in Cambridge, and while in many ways it is viewed as a prelude to The Game—the tailgate is not nearly as big, and the stadium is still lacking 13,000 fans from the capacity crowd that shows up every other November—that doesn’t stop it from being a unique atmosphere appreciated by supporters and athletes alike.

“We’re very grateful for the support we got [Friday night],” Harvard coach Tim Murphy said. “It was a very exciting, loud, festive atmosphere. The three night games we have had have all been very exciting, down-to-the-wire football games, with big response from the student body and the Harvard community.”

There’s no question that the night game is one of the few times a season that the Crimson truly enjoys a home-field advantage.

In the fourth quarter Friday night, the fans got loud at all the appropriate times—when senior receiver Matt Luft’s feet just barely dragged through the endzone on a pass that was originally declared incomplete, when the game clock stopped working during Brown’s final drive, when the Harvard defense came up with stop after stop as the Bears sought the endzone and the win.

And watching the Crimson players on the sideline turn to the crowd and raise their arms, encouraging the fans’ roars as the seconds ticked away and Harvard’s first victory of the season became a reality, it’s clear that the athletes enjoy the atmosphere even more than the fans.

“It was just fantastic,” Murphy said. “As far as I am concerned, we could play a couple of them.”

While more than one Friday night game might be implausible—Brown and Holy Cross, the two teams to have played at Harvard Stadium at night, are far and away the teams closest to Cambridge—think about it this way:

The last three seasons, Harvard’s first victory has come at home under the lights. In the last two, it has been the first win on the road to the Ivy crown.

If this trend continues, the Crimson Crazies might find themselves under the Friday night lights a bit more often.

—Staff writer Kate Leist can be reached at kleist@fas.harvard.edu.