FOR THE PAST few autumns the Harvard soccer team has followed a script about as varied as a John Wayne movie. Each fall the story would be the same. The nucleus of the previous year's nationally-ranked Crimson squad would return to Cambridge, breeze through the regular season with perhaps one loss, and finish first or second in the Ivy League.

The curtain would then close in December in the NCAA post-season tournament with Harvard bowing out in either the quarter or semifinal round, and an otherwise successful season would end on a uniformly sour note.

For the one or two thousand Harvard students sober or energetic enough to crawl out of bed at 9:30 o'clock Saturday morning for the long trek over to the Business School field, standing around three deep in the rain or the cold was a small price to pay to see Harvard's superbly-turned soccer machine roll over its opponents week after week.

The Crimson's short-passing, foreign brand of soccer and the tongue twisting names of its players became as much team trademarks as its winning records as Harvard teams went through the last four years with just one home loss, two regular season setbacks, and losses each year in the NCAAs.

This year, however, the script may have to be completely revised to accommodate a new, largely unknown cast of characters. Graduation, college athletics' great equalizer, has always thinned the ranks. This year, unlike past years, the thin spots may actually become completely bald.

THE OFFENSE IS virtually nonexistent as of the moment. All-American, All-Ivy Chris Papagianis, who carried the bulk of the team's scoring after Felix Adedeji hurt his back last season, will be sorely missed, both by the team and his numerous female fans.

Forward Bent Hinze, who discovered halfway through last season that the environmental studies major he had planned to take did not in fact exist at Harvard, agreed to stay on until the end of the Fall whereupon he returned for good to his native Norway.

Yugoslavian forward Dragan Vujovic, a talented if inconsistent forward, put up with passport hassles which delayed his arrival last Fall but finally decided to chuck Harvard in the Spring after realizing the uselessness of a Harvard education in Eastern Europe. He, like Hinze, returned home. Thus the offense lost three of four starters, with the oddity being that only one actually graduated.

What head coach Bruce Munro has left offensively is, as he puts it, "Felix, Felix, and more Felix." Felix is, of course, Felix Adedeji. A first team All-Ivy pick and league leading scorer two years ago, he started out last season with a four goal performance against Columbia, but a muscle spasm resulting from that game hobbled him the rest of the year. If Harvard is going to go anywhere offensively this fall, Adedeji will be a key. With his linemates gone, opposing teams will be able to concentrate on containing him more than in the past.

"Felix is psyched and in excellent shape," captain Steve Kidder said Thursday, but it was difficult to confirm that assessment because, true to every soccer player's dream, Adedeji has been dividing his time between kicking field goals for the football team and playing soccer. Whether he will be Harvard's answer to Cornell's Bill Murray remains to be seen.

Adedeji's offensive effectiveness, however, may be severely limited if Munro cannot come up with some competent linemates. At the moment only senior Tony Van Niel, who picked up two goals against Princeton in his only starting role last year, has a good shot for one of the four front spots.

The other two are up for grabs among a large group of sophomore talent that Munro has yet to sort out. In any case, look for the Crimson to score significantly less than in recent years. As Kidder said, "We are not going to blow anyone off the field this year."

Midfield, a problem area last year, will boast no returning starters and must be completely rebuilt. Since there is no base the term rebuilding might be an understatement. Gone are three-year starter Emmanuel Ekama All-Ivy honorable mention Bahman Mossavar-Rahmani, and Demetrio Mena. Mena, a senior who had thought he had used up his eligibility, had not planned to return for the Fall term but has recently been declared eligible again and, hopefully he might be persuaded to return.

WHERE MUNRO IS going to find halfbacks has to be one of his biggest worries as he puts his squad through double workout sessions this week. "We need a good strong center half," he said Thursday, "and we'll probably have to make some halfbacks out of some fullbacks." Starting left fullback Ric LaCivita has already gone this route, and appears to be the only one with a halfback spot tied down.

Moving back to defense the picture, fortunately, is not nearly so grim. All-Ivy Ric Scott has graduated and, continuing a tradition started last year by All-American fullback Cris Wilmot, has stayed on as an assistant coach. The other two positions, however, will be capably filled by returning starter Brian Fearnett and Lawsun Wulsin, who began to see a lot of playing time at the end of last season. Steve Mead will be fighting Wulsin for a starting position in the three-man defense Munro has tentatively decided to employ in this year's 4-3-3 alignment. The team appears relatively deep at this position.

Goalie and captain Steve Kidder is as capable a goalie as there is in the Ivy League, and he is a vastly more experienced and steady netminder than he was a year ago after stepping into the starting role vacated by US Olympic and New York Cosmos goalie Shep Messing.

Both reigning Ivy champion Penn and NCAA semi-finalist Cornell will return with teams as good or better than last year's editions, while Brown will threaten those two for the top spot. Both Dartmouth and Yale have been gaining fast as a result of two consecutive crops of outstanding freshmen, and may give Harvard a serious run this year which they have failed to do in the past.

"I don't see any soft pickings anywhere," Munro lamented.