It was a game neither team deserved to win, and neither did. It ended fittingly, with a 31-yd. field goal attempt curving wide past the right crossbar to spoil a 14-point, fourth-quarter comeback.

And now it has been five years since Harvard has beaten Princeton, and 351 days since Harvard has beaten anybody in Cambridge, and you might as well say, six years since the last Ivy title, because really, the 1981 football season is over.

Sure, some good things happened Saturday, like Jim Callinan's 190 yards on 34 carries for the second-best rushing day in Harvard history, or Tiger Bob Holly's 24 completions for 278 yards and two touch-downs or Princeton scatback Larry Van Pelt's 99 yards on the ground at the Stadium before 17,500.

But despite all of those yards, when it was time to make the big play, neither offense could and the result was a shell of a football game--all of the numbers and none of the heart. That the Big Numbers came out even, 17-17, is a tribute more to the mediocrity of the Ivy League this year than to anything else.

If any game deserved to be a tie, this one did. The biggest play of the afternoon was a motion penalty against Harvard with less than a minute left on the clock and the ball on the Tiger 12. Princeton's heroes were a yellow flag and a swirling wind.

The Tigers started the fourth quarter leading, 17-3, but no lead is safe for a defense that lets Harvard rush for 311 yards. Within nine minutes, the game was tied. The teams traded punts and then the Crimson defense stopped Princeton on a fourth and one and took over on the visitors' 45 with two and a half minutes left.

"If you stop them on fourth and one like that, they should lose the ball game," Harvard coach Joe Restic, a lifetime 3-6-2 against Princeton, said after the game. The Tigers didn't because Restic's offense couldn't get the ball in the end zone from the 12-yd. line in three plays.

Egg Carrier

One of those three plays was the illegal motion cell, Harvard's sixth offensive penalty of the day and third inside the Tiger 20. The infraction pushed the ball back to the 17, and from there Restic put all of his eggs in Jim Villaneva's basket. Callinan gained four yards on two plays as the clock ticked down to seven seconds. After a pair of time outs, the sophomore missed the game-winning field goal kicking into the wind.

"When you get down to the field goal, the hard work is over," Restic said. "What you have to do is kick the field goal and win the ball game." Sound simple? It wasn't.

Of course, things would have been much simpler if Harvard's first three drives--which covered a total of 122 yards on 35 plays and ended in a missed field goal, a failed fake field goal and a punt--had produced any points at all. Or if Harvard's fourth possession, which culminated in a 21-yd. Villanueva field goal at 11:11 of the second quarter that broke a scoreless deadlock, had ended in a touchdown. The Crimson did punch the ball home once on that drive, but the play was called back because an ineligible receiver was downfield when Ron Cuccia hit Tim Acheson in the endzone. Without that penalty, it might have been downright easy.

Then again, if Princeton had any defense at all, the comeback would have been impossible. Only against this bunch, which allowed an incredible average of 443 yards a game entering the contest, could Harvard have moved the ball all day the way it did. The Crimson's trick plays were the only failures, especially the newest weapon in the Multiflex arsenal, a quarterback-in-motion gag using both Cuccia and Don Allard that resulted in three penalties, one incomplete pass and one completion.

Swiss Watch

The most effective of all was Callinan, who romped through holes the size of Switzerland all day to come within ten yards of the second 200-yd. rushing day in Crimson history (Vernon Strunk rushed for 233 yards against Princeton in 1937). Give Mike Corbat and the rest of the offensive line some credit for that--as well as Jimmy Garvey's personal best of 56 yards on ten carries and Jim Acheson's 64 on 18.

But in the fourth quarter it was Callinan who carried the brunt of the comeback on his shoulders, rushing 13 times in the period for 75 yards. In only one clutch situation did he not get the call, and then, perhaps, he should have: with Harvard on its own 44 late in the fourth quarter in a short yardage situation on third down, Cuccia kept off tackleon an option, didn't get the first down, and the Crimson had to punt.