Chez Shaffner

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Harvard-Yale 2006 – Part One

Two weeks late reporting on this, continuing a recent trend...

Another year, another meeting of the Harvard and Yale football teams. Alumni of these two schools and people living in Massachusetts still call it “The Game,” though I think a lot of other rivalries stake a claim to the same title. But so long as Wikipedia still refers to Harvard-Yale as THE Game, those other rivalries can kiss our Ivy League asses.

The outcome of the football contest itself was pretty ugly for our side, and having watched all but five minutes of the action, I’d say that we were lucky the score remained so close. Yale beat the ever living hell out of us.

While I was in college (and for five years afterwards), the Harvard-Yale game marked the one time each year that we had a real college party. It might not be the Big Ten or the SEC, but it was kegs and cheeseburgers and freezing our butts off for six hours.

Two years ago, I scrambled eggs for a dozen friends at my apartment, cracked our first beers at seven-thirty, and partied hard through the afternoon. Two years ago I made it inside for part of the fourth quarter, though most of our crew partied through. Two years ago, people flew in to sleep on my floor. Sadly, it appears those days have ended.

Last year, I made the trip to Yale with two of my buddies. We brought a few cases of beer and stood around them. We ended up running into about a dozen people we knew, and that was it. I knew then that the sun had set on our annual mini-reunion.

Above: The Harvard Band and the hand of God, or something...

This year, I was excited about The Game mainly because it was my opportunity to show Keryn that the Ivy League could have a real football game. Now, I knew better than to suggest that it could hold a candle to her idea of a college football game –she went to Ole Miss, and The Grove is world famous as a tailgating venue (though “tailgating” might be an insult), so she’s something of an elitist regarding what constitutes a real football game. Anyway, despite my enthusiasm, I still managed to request my tickets a week past the class seating deadline, which meant we were five sections over from all those classmates I was supposed to be excited to see. Oh well, I’d see them at the tailgate.

Above: Though this picture may raise some doubts, I was stone sober in the stone stadium.

But we never found the tailgate. In the HUPD's continuing quest to confuse and bewilder, the tailgates were a disaster; in typical Bostonian fashion, the signage was poor. Adding insult to injury, heavy rains had turned the rugby and soccer fields into a viscous soup. I swiped one beer from what turned out to be the Harvard Business School tailgate, and by the time I learned we were two fields away from the class tailgates, it was time for kickoff.

Mark the official pre-game tally as one beer drunk, zero tailgates attended, and one classmate encountered (fifty feet from the gate of the stadium)… On the plus side, the weather was amazing. Sunny and clear, low fifties temps. A right fine day to toss around the pigskin. Into Harvard Stadium we marched, ready for The Game…

In tomorrow’s installment: recalling a brutal workout, explaining the band’s Hand of God bit, and the joys of concrete bench seating…

4 Comments:

At 7:08 AM, Veritas99 said...: Whatever. You know running stadiums was fun, and had to be better than getting taken out by a bike on a 5 mile run by the river.
At 7:13 AM, NormalGuyNormalGirl said...: Please -- I took out that biker, he didn't take me out... I'll talk about it in today's posting, but one of these days, I'm going to sprint that stadium again. HA!
At 7:38 AM, Veritas99 said...: Just make sure you have the paramedics on standby.
At 8:35 AM, NormalGuyNormalGirl said...: I'm insulted and hurt by your lack of faith. Or...

"The outrages I have suffered today will not be soon forgotten. I will not be forgetting, (pause) those outrages. No they won't be forgetten, not the outrages." - Stewie