Snapshots of The Game

I was in the middle of the prospective student tour at Yale when we stopped by the library. Trying as best I could to take the moment home with me, I used my entire role of film shooting the silly pseudo-medieval architecture. It was grandiose and slightly cheesy—it was a church built for students looking to worship the gods and goddesses of academia. It was wonderful and I was in love with Yale, convinced that their strong English department and this library with its gargoyles—not angry dragons but students hunched over their books—would foster the kind of college experience I was planning to have. Bygones. I chose Harvard, and as far as I’m concerned, though I may have been equally happy and well-educated at Yale, I made the right decision.

Fast forward to my first year at Harvard, living one floor above this Hawaiian guy who always had to wake up early for football practice. He probably didn’t appreciate the 3 a.m. dance parties I had in order to wake myself up long enough to finish this or that problem set. My roommates and I went to a few games, probably because we wanted to see my prefect, who was the mascot, dance around in an oversized Puritan outfit. At a game against Brown I remember him getting into a testosterone tussle with their mascot. We laughed all the way home: nothing like the physically timid yet emotionally charged pushes and shoves exchanged between the mascots of two athletically marginal teams.

Then there was the morning shuttle to New Haven my sophomore year. Not until the trip we thought would take two-and-a-half hours had taken about four, did we learn that the bus driver was “new.” She had also been looking at the map upside down and had driven us very close to Cape Cod. Our anticipation had fermented into plain anger as we realized the tailgates and opening kickoff were all happening without us. As the frazzled bus driver stepped off the bus to “recollect her thoughts’” we talked seriously about hijacking the whole operation, locking her out of the bus and finishing our supply of “Finest Quality Cossack Vodka.”

I remember the long walk back to the Quad after defeat during my junior year. The crowds spilled out into the street and a cab driver interested in the results of the game shouted at me from his car. We were ahead at the half and simply couldn’t hold on; we had just watched our team hand Handsome Dan a large Crimson rump to chomp. I could barely answer the cab driver or express the strange feeling I had to my little sister when I talked to her on the phone that night. Football doesn’t affect my life in any real way, and yet I felt as though I had been let down. There was a real possibility that I might spend four years at Harvard without seeing a Yale win…or even a decent tailgate.

And now the new memories: The morning spent with good friends and a glass of warm rum cider. My roommates and I standing among the hoards waiting to rush the field, shocked by the Yale band’s flag burning half-time show but proud that we had finally stuck it to them (and on their own turf, no less). Once on the field, I turned to see none other than President Lawrence H. Summers milling among the jubilated crowds. No time to consider proper protocol, I went with my instincts and asked him to pose for a celebratory photo. Just another of the vivid memories, the snapshots really, that whether stored away in an album or in tucks and folds of my mind, will help to relive or at least recount my four wonderful years here.