Monday Mourning

As the old grads trailed away from the Stadium late Saturday afternoon, even the hardest-bitten had to admit that the 1946 season was a proud one. Alumni have a way of taking traditional rivalries and inflating these matches until entire seasons are made, or broken, by the one Big Game. According to these standards, this fall's slate is very little better than that of other years when the Varsity fell before nearly every power in he east. The importance of this Yale game was accentuated by the resurgent interest of scattered sons of the University who followed the game by wire, radio, and cable all over the world, and who may well have sworn that the national title, as well as the athletic honors of the two institutions were hanging on these sixty minutes of play.

Thus each recurring fall classic adds to the legend of this gridiron affair, and generation after generation of Crimson football players must adjust to the outsize importance of the game. The postwar crop of athletes, as it would appear from reports from other parts of the nation, no longer is willing to shed that last drop of blood in the Homecoming Battle, preferring to eke out a successful record for their team week by week. Locker-room strife at Indiana and Ohio State has been laid to just such indifference of the local "Yale" rivalries. The fact that Dick Harlow, working with much the same type of ex-servicemen, could maintain his team's morale, ignite it to the levels of Saturday's inspired first period--is evidence of the wizardry that Harvard men recognize as the heart of the Harlow system.

But even the gamest team can be ground down, and as the Blue backfield promenaded all over the field Saturday, many were the grumbles from deep inside the raccoon coats. This was Yale, and early-season wins over provincial seminaries were merely so many statistics cluttering up the record. In other years, this unyielding Sophomorism would have been as much a part of the proceedings as Handsome Dan. But this year it must not be allowed to cloud the fact that a green team, playing together for the first time, rose from the nether corners of the Ivy League doormat, where the guessers and Washington Street halfbacks had relegated it back in September, to win seven games of nine and give the University its finest state since 1931. So the copious tears that were shed in the late afternoon haze were greatly wasted. Yale had won, but many of the full-time fans were thinking about the first half at Hanover, the first ten minutes at Princeton, and the great comeback against Holy Cross.