On November 23, 1968 I spent the afternoon high on the roof of venerable Harvard Stadium. That vantage point afforded me a spectacular panoramic view of Boston and Cambridge. It also provided a privileged downward view of the most storied football game in Ivy League history.

Going into this game, both the Harvard and Yale teams were undefeated. That meant that the Ivy League championship of that year was at stake. By winning, either school could be seated at the top of the eight-team league.

By most critics, Yale was considered the stronger team. On the New Haven campus, its quarterback, Brian Dowling, carried a special nickname ─ “God.” He had never lost a game in high school or college. He had also become the character “BD” in his roommate Gary Trudeau’s comic strip Doonesbury.

Now cut to last week. That’s when I crashed the college reunion of the Harvard class of 1969. There, assembled before me, 41 years later, were a dozen stalwarts of that famous football victory.

Yes, victory is the correct word to describe the outcome of that game. After all, in the second quarter Yale held a 22-to-nothing lead; 3 minutes from the end a 29-to-13 advantage, and an apparently fool-proof  29-to-21 lead, with only 3 seconds left in the game.

Yet, on the final two plays of the game, Harvard managed to score 8 points and thus achieve what everyone, including the Yalies and their fans, considered a devastating victory: a score of 29 to 29.

In the last period, many people had decided the game was over. From my airy perch, I could see fans by the hundreds walking across the Anderson Bridge to the Cambridge side of the Charles River.

For these Crimson rationalists, there was no way their outplayed team was going to come back from such an imposing deficit in such a short time.

For me, however, the view continued to be worth cherishing. Even if the home team was in a hopeless fix and was never going to come back, I could still enjoy the scene spread out before me.

Last week’s reunion featured a special event, the showing of the film whose title echoes the immortal Harvard Crimson headline “Harvard Beats Yale 29 to 29.” Assembled in a spacious auditorium, the reunioners cheered whenever the football footage showed any signs of life from the Crimson side.

Interspersed between clips of the ongoing football action, the filmmaker showed single interviews with dozens of the players, four decades later.  This ongoing commentary added much to the interest of the film and made the stick figures in football uniforms, now 60 years old, into live human beings in their present-day real-life guises.

One Yale player in particular, Mike Bouscaren, drew the ire of the crowd of aging alums when he claimed he had deliberately caused an injury to a Harvard running back.

That ire turned to derisive laughter, however, when a diagrammed replay showed that this player was nowhere near the part of the field where the ball carrier was injured. And that was not the only instance in which this Yalie claimed to have done things contrary to what the record shows.

After the film, I discussed this game with the Crimson’s greatest hero, Frank Ciampi. He had seen little action all year, except what he witnessed from the bench. A junior quarterback from Everett, he had not expected to play in the final game at all.

But when things continued to go bad, John Yovicsin, the Harvard coach sent Ciampi in to take over from the starting quarterback. At that point in the second period, Frank felt nervous but determined to give it his best.

As it turned out, Frank played like a pro. In both passing and rushing he caused a collapse of the Yale defense. With astonishing speed and deception, he managed to elude tacklers and make big gains when they were most needed.

This was the same player, who in the following season, was to drop out of football altogether. As he explained his reasons to me, “I found it very difficult to play because I had friends in Vietnam.” Despite his heroics in the famous 29 to 29 game, his concern about the war in Vietnam and other issues of the time had made football unimportant.

As I look back at this memorable sports event of four decades ago, it still seems worth taking pleasure in. On one level, it remains only a game, but it bestowed ongoing athletic glory to players who have known how to bring perspective to it.

Perhaps their later-life achievements owe something to the experience on the football field on that day, long ago.

Their sports feat required a discipline that made it possible for them to subordinate their own individual actions to the good of the whole team.

I like the simple moral that another of that day’s heroes, Stephen Gloyd, now a physician specialist in global health at the University of Washington, draws from his team’s great comeback. “You don’t give up ─ sometimes miracles happen.”

Richard Griffin