Fifty years after Harvard’s historic comeback in the waning seconds of The Game against Yale in 1968, George Howe Colt wrote a great book.

Harvard and Yale entered the final game of the season with identical 8-0 records, the first time both had gone undefeated for decades.  Yale with its All American quarterback Brian Dowling and its soon to be first round NFL draft pick Calvin Hill was favored despite being the visiting team, and they scored almost at will running up a 15 point lead by halftime.  A depleted Harvard team without its star running backs, captain Vic Gatto and Ray Hornblower, began to claw its way back into the game when a little-used quarterback from Everett, MA, Frank Chiampi was subbed into the game.  Aided by six Yale fumbles, some helpful calls by the referee, and the recovery of an on-sides kick, Harvard managed to tie the game with no time on the clock by scoring a touchdown and a 2 point conversion as darkness descended on the 40,000 spectators in Harvard stadium.

Howe, the author of the National Book Award finalist, “The Big House” which I loved, could have written a straightforward sports book. Instead, he dug below the surface to examine the major issues of the day—the Vietnam War, SDS and the Progressive Labor Party, Nixon, the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the riots in Watts, Detroit, and other cities.  The result is a terrific book which balances the specific stories of dozens of players in The Game with the depiction of how the broader issues and tensions of the time affected them.

While I think that this book would be loved by sports fans for its tense re-creation of Harvard’s miraculous comeback, I also think it would appeal to any of us of a certain generation, especially those who attended Harvard or Yale in those tumultuous years.  I had graduated in the spring before the action described in the book, and many of the issues like Vietnam and the occupation of University Hall would have been unthinkable just those few months earlier, so it felt almost new to me.  I loved the allusions to Hazens, Out Of Town News, Elsie’s, and other familiar landmarks.   My dear wife’s junior high school honey, Bob Levin played fullback for Yale in The Game and having been dropped by Susan, had moved on to Meryl Streep.  His loss, my gain.

If you’re 80ish, love football, an alum of Harvard or Yale, or just looking for a very well written story in the form of a ‘then and now’, you’ll enjoy “The Game.”