A sporting dispatch from Danville, Kentucky, last week brought nostalgia to the one-time followers of the Centre College Praying Colonels of Bo McMillan fame. It also calls to mind that only 30 years ago when Centre beat the Crimson, Harvard football was at the pinnacle of Big Time football. Times have changed for both colleges.

Today in the small Kentucky college town, Centre fans are no longer cheering for a team which can humble the mightiest. The Centre eleven doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to the McMillan outfit which pulled off the upset of the half century by ending a five year Harvard winning streak, beating the Crimson, 6 to 0, in the Stadium. Centre fans are rooting for a club which has won four straight this season, yes, but not victories over Tulane, Indiana, and Kentucky. The Praying Colonels have returned to the league which they left for a few brief years of glory and gate receipts, a league of small, amateur Kentucky colleges.

Harvard's rise to national grid fame was not so sudden as Centre and the decline from the ranks of the mighty has been more gradual. Despite what some of the nation's more snide press scribes may write, the Crimson also has not sunken to the obscurity of Centre College. Eastern football in general has skidded into amateurim and the Crimson has gone along with the trend--though most Harvard fans might wish that the Crimson were not holding up the bottom of the de-emphasized league.

Harvard is still very much in the league in which it achieved national power. But compared to the grandeur that was the era of the Centre upset, the Crimson football scene is more stagnant.

There was more furor raised over the loss to Centre than several losing seasons have caused in recent Crimson grid history. Contrary to current myth, the Centre eleven was not a bunch of small college hicks from Kentucky. The Colonels had walloped national champion West Virginia the previous year and prior to the 1921 Harvard contest had beaten powerhouse Crimson and run several lesser lights into the ground. The day of the game, in fact, the CRIMSON predicted a "battle royal" and 43,000 fans didn't jam the Stadium to see a rout. They didn't.

McMillan's squad pulled the upset, and Harvard rooters of that era apparently thought the University had folded. The Monday after the one-touchdown loss a member of the football advisory committee in a front page editorial in the CRIMSON said the defeat "demonstrates conclusively the critical condition of the University eleven." Harsh words for a team with a five-one-one record. But Harvard took its defeats with no shrugs in those days.

Over 1200 undergraduates were so upset by the Centre loss that they jammed the Union Tuesday night for a gigantic "Support the Team Rally" and marched to the Stadium on Wednesday to cheer the squad in practice before it left for Princeton. It didn't do much good. Harvard lost, 10 to 3.

The climax to this year of the Great Upset came when Harvard walloped previously undefeated Yale, 10 to 3, in the Stadium. This win was hailed by Grantland Rice as one of the "greatest victories in fifty years of football play."

It seems a little strange that the Centre game should have been named by the sportswriters as the "upset of the half-century" last year when this Yale game was considered at the time, of far greater import. But perhaps in the long run it is only right that the Centre game should stand out above all as the "darkest hour" for the Crimson as a national power. When Bo McMillan scored the game's only touchdown on a 32 yard dash, he ended more than a five-year streak which included a Rose Bowl victory. He had unwittingly written finis to the scourge of the nation's gridirons. Harvard was to rise to the top again at times as it did against Yale the same year; but never to the dizzy heights that preceded Centre's memorable Stadium appearance.