Preserving The Game's integrity--that was the goal. Some find that surprising.

A friend of Yale football had wanted to market a hat in the shape of the Yale Bowl with models of crimson and blue gridders towering over the miniature stadium.

"We said. 'No, we're not going to do that one,'" recalls Yale Athletic Director Frank Ryan. "We tried to find an appropriate way to recognize the occasion without doing anything gaudy or offensive."

So when Nathan Garland first constructed the official logo. Ryan sent the New Haven graphic designer back to the drawing board for fine tuning several times. He wanted Garland to measure the total square area alloted to both the block H and block Y.

Says Garland wryly. "I've been intrigued and surprised about how passionate people are about this occasion."

The occasion in question is nothing less formidable than the 100th playing of the Harvard-Yale game, a game so momentous, so important that its organizers proudly say they have spent several months trying to do practically nothing.

Sure, Saturday's big event features The Official Logo, and The Official Program ($5), and The Official Handkerchief ($2), and The 100th Game Ticket in Lucite ($30), and The Golf Shirt ($29.50), and The Tote Bag ($12.50), and the pre-game descent by the U.S. Navy's Shooting Stars parachute squad, and special jerseys, and the commemorative coin-toss featuring about 50 former captains.

But, organizers assert, all the planning for the 100th game has been done in an effort to avoid overshadowing The Game itself.

Garland, for example, recalls Ryan "was interested in expressing in a certain style and appropriateness the special occasion."

"His basic concern in expressing the Harvard-Yale game was to do something judicious and even-handed."

"I really was aspiring to do something that was appropriate...I fall back on the word appropriate."

Garland's logo, which intertwines an H and Y, was just one component of a master plan for the 100th game, which had three underlying principles, according to Carroll Lowenstein '53, who served as the Harvard liasion on Yale's organizational committee.

In addition "to preserving the integrity of The Game" and making the action on the field "the focus of the occasion," Lowenstein said. "This occasion should reinforce the virtues of athletics concentrated within and nourished by an educational perspective shared by Harvard and Yale."

This concern for integrity, tradition and education was responsible for what organizers consider to be a modest list of 10 official memorabilia items (Since drawing up and publishing the list. Harvard and Yale have stopped offering two items, because of little interest. Women's Stick Pin ($65) and the 14k gold cuff links, whose price had been available upon request.)

The desire, as one Yale planner says, "to preserve the integity of The Game and yet increase it" was similarly the impetus for the oversized game ticket, also designed by Garland.