Crimson’s in clover with 37-6 victory

NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- According to tradition, the Harvard-Yale football game is played in Boston only in even years.

But in truth, every year of the rivalry is an odd one.

There was the time a parking-lot attendant peeked into a party tent and discovered it was full of naked revelers. Or the fan who showed up towing a sailboat overflowing with cans of beer on ice. Or the hoity-toity tailgaters -- now largely a thing of the past -- who wore full-length raccoon-skin coats and treated pregame festivities like formal affairs.

“In the ‘60’s you’d see the candelabras, the Bentleys and butlers with white gloves,” said Hank Higdon, a Yale captain in 1962. “It’s not that way anymore. It’s much more egalitarian.”

The schools weren’t on equal footing Saturday. In a game that was supposed to be close, Harvard rolled to a 37-6 victory at the Yale Bowl, winning the Ivy League title outright for the third time in seven seasons. Not since 1968 had Harvard and Yale come into the game -- or “The Game” as people here call it -- with unblemished records in league play.

That 1968 game famously ended in a 29-29 tie. This one wasn’t even close and would have been a shutout but for Yale’s Gio Christodoulou scoring on an 87-yard punt return with about four minutes remaining. With the victory, Harvard (8-2) ended a perfect-season bid by Yale (9-1) for the fifth time, having spoiled that in 1921, 1968, 1974 and 1979.

Harvard’s Matt Luft, a 6-foot-5 sophomore from Thousand Oaks High, was the star on a frigid afternoon. He scored the first two touchdowns on receptions of 40 and 33 yards and finished with eight catches for 160 yards. He said the victory was sweet revenge for Yale’s 34-13 victory at Harvard in last season’s finale.

“They kicked our butt up and down the field in our house,” he said. “We wanted to return the favor here today.”

That might sound like a familiar sports sentiment, but the tradition surrounding this event is anything but typical. As heated as the games can be, the relationship between the schools is uncommonly cordial.

There are the occasional shenanigans, crude cheers by students and funny T-shirts -- a memorable one reading, “Read this if you hate Yale” -- but most of it is just good-natured fun.

“It’s a very peculiar relationship,” said Yale’s Jarrett Drake, a junior receiver. “I have a lot of friends at Harvard. It’s like you hate them for 60 minutes, but ultimately you have to have respect for them.”

Alumni from both schools traditionally kick off the weekend by getting together for a banquet and flag-football game. It’s not unusual for large groups of Harvard students to stay in Yale sleeping quarters. And, instead of simply a Yale logo, the midfield was painted with a linked crimson H and blue Y.

“In the next 100 years, I hope Harvard wins 50 of them and Yale wins 50,” said Carroll Lowenstein, a star quarterback for the Crimson in the early 1950s.

“But,” he confided, “I hope we beat the daylights out of them today.”

In the stands are some of the most influential people in the worlds of business, politics and science. Millionaires, and sometimes billionaires, mingle with students and everyday spectators. At one tailgate party Saturday was Edward M. Kennedy, the senator from Massachusetts who in 1955 scored Harvard’s only touchdown, on a five-yard reception, in a 21-7 loss at the Yale Bowl.

“It was a rainy day,” Kennedy recalled. “My dad was there, and so were my brothers, Jack and Bobby. I scored, so there were only four people from Harvard who were happy that day. Everybody else was sad.”

On Saturday, Kennedy wore a gray sports coat and slacks and clomped around in fur-lined boots, shaking hands and smiling for pictures. He played left end in college and joked, “Some people think that’s where I got my political philosophy.”

The Game is steeped in tradition. One of those involves a small and faded crimson flag, emblazoned with a gold H, that was first waved by Harvard freshman Fredrick Plummer in 1884, nine years after the school’s first football game against Yale. That flag, attached to a shillelagh, is kept in a steel tube for all but one day a year then brought out for The Game.

Plummer waved that flag at 59 consecutive Yale games before his death. That duty now belongs to Bill Markus, a 1960 Harvard alumnus and longtime football fan.

“We bring it around to tailgate parties before The Game and people go crazy for it,” said Bob Glatz, a former Crimson running back and executive director of the Harvard Varsity Club. “A lot of people just want to get their picture taken with it. When you’re at a party, it’s like the world’s best wingman.”

Folks from that school take their flags seriously. At halftime Saturday, a Yale fan ran onto the field and tried to swipe a giant Harvard flag. He was tackled and pummeled by the male and female cheerleaders -- cheerleaders! -- before security guards escorted him off the field.

It was one of the day’s more humorous moments. And there has been a lot of that back-and-forth chicanery over the years. In 2004, Yale students wearing fake Harvard “pep squad” shirts used a card stunt to trick more than 1,800 Harvard fans into holding up placards that formed a phrase disparaging their own school.

Not everyone from Harvard was miffed.

“I loved it,” Glatz said. “Creativity, ingenuity, you’ve got to give it to those guys. Some of those kids could have probably even gotten into Harvard.”

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sam.farmer@latimes.com