It had fallen apart a few weeks before, but reality set in on this night somewhere between the steak and ice cream.

Yale football team Captain Tom Giella had just finished the main course at the post-Cornell game team dinner but was still hungry. Yet Cornell's 41-7 destruction of the Bulldogs just a few hours earlier lingered. Giella removed himself from the table.

"That game was just absurd," Giella recalls. "We made them look like the Dallas Cowboys and made ourselves look like we'd never been coached"

"I didn't deserve any ice cream."

That pounding administered by previously winless Cornell left the Yale squad 0-8 and earned Giella an honor he'd just as soon do without. With the loss, Thomas Joseph Giella earned the dubious distinction as the captain of the worst football team in Yale history.

That fact hurts nobody more than Giella. You can't help but feel for the East Meadow. N.Y. native, who in his 10 years of organized football has won five championshps and never experienced anything this humiliating

"Every week I try to tell the guys not to give up, and then we go and lose another game," says the 21-year-old defensive tackle. "It really hurts me inside I feel like I've let the team down a bit."

"It's been an unfortunate thing," adds fellow senior Kevin Kalinich, of the squad's misfortunes. "But anyone can be a good captain when you're winning all your games. If takes a lot more courage and a lot more heart from the captain when you're not."

In what has undoubtedly become Yale's longest season ever, courage and heart have become Giella's calling card.

"If I knew over the summer last year that we were going to be 0-8," Giella says. "I don't think I'd have run one less mile or done one less push-up."

Yale coaches and players admit Giella's commitment to his team has been one of the season's few bright spots.

"He keeps plugging away, pushing himself to the brink," an admiring Yale Coach Carn Cozza says. He a hear fighter and that feat helped every one here during the tough times.

"This year hasn't been tougher on anyone than Tom." Defensive Live Coach Bill Samko says. "He's been hit with hard problems and hard questions both on and off the field and yet, he's the first one to come back every week and try that much harder."

What coaches and players unlike are quick as stress about the 6-ft., 2-in. Giella, who has never missed a day of practice in his four years at New Haven, is that he is the hardest working Bulldog around these days.

"Your just don't give up," Giella says. "Once you start giving up, you're finished. You just keep on trying, trying like you never tried before. At least that way you'll have a fighting chance in every game you play."