A couple weeks ago I got a message from a friend of mine asking me if I would be making the trek to New Haven for the Harvard Yale game this year. I was on the fence. I didn’t know if it would be worth the long, early morning bus ride. Also after being at Harvard for only a couple months, I wasn’t sure if I felt fully committed to our sports teams. However, I eventually figured that viewing one of oldest rivalries in the history of college sports was probably not an event to be missed. They must call this thing “The Game” for a reason, right?
Harvard had arranged for a fleet of buses to take the grad students down to Yale. I woke up at six in the morning, met up with a group of friends, and caught a bus to New Haven. I was pretty sure that I had made a wise life choice when I saw that trailing our bus was a U-Haul filled with nothing but food and drinks for us to consume at the game.
One of the things I had heard about the Harvard-Yale game was that the majority of people that come out never even make it into the stadium. Students will come to the game and just end up tailgating all day. When I stepped foot in the parking lot at the Yale Bowl, it was easy to see why. The place was a sea of humanity. Students were packed far and wide. Everyone was listening to music, grilling up food, and getting pumped full of team spirit.
My friends and I could tell what areas of the parking lot were going to be friendly territory for us by sizing up the ratio of red shirts to blue shirts in any given pack of students. One of the guys I was with had actually gone to Harvard for undergrad. After we walked around the area for awhile, he suggested we head over to the row of tailgating spots staked out by the Harvard fraternities.
What I have failed to mention is that in between all this wandering around, the game had actually already started. By the time we made it to the fraternity spots, the first quarter was over and Harvard was down 10-0. This was not supposed to be happening. Harvard had been the heavy favorite going into the game. We decided that with the game underway, and our team down, it was probably a good time to head into the stadium and start supporting the Crimson.
The second quarter and third quarters were not much help to Harvard. Neither team scored, and there was both a botched fake field goal attempt and a botched fake punt (at 4th and 24!). With about ten minutes left in the fourth quarter, things were looking bleak. A decent number of the people that I had been sitting with had decided to head back to the tailgate instead of watching the remainder of what was shaping up to be a very disappointing game.
With about seven minutes to go, a funny thing happened. We scored. The Harvard students section went nuts. We had been waiting all afternoon to put points on the board and now towards the end of the fourth quarter we had actually done it. At least we knew that this was not going to be a shut out. Then miraculously with about a minute left in the game, we scored again! Harvard was up 14-10. As the final seconds ticked off the clock, the students section went absolutely insane. After being down for almost the entire game, we had scored two touchdowns in the last seven minutes to win the game.
Up until this weekend I had taken part in many of the rites of passage of life at Harvard Law. I have taken the classes, spent long nights in Langdell Library, and gotten my fill of the bars and restaurants in Harvard Square. However, I think that on some level jumping up and down like a maniac with a several thousand other Harvard students, cheering on our football team as we defeated our century-old rivals, was the final requirement before I could feel like a full member of the Harvard community. In retrospect, I am pretty glad that my friends managed to convince me to come out.
- Anit
