Meet Percy Haughton, Class of 1889, an All-American tackle and football coach from 1908 to 1916, looking like a face out of Brideshead Revisited. Meet Bill McCurdy--McCurdy to his friends--who molded the track program for 30 years. Meet the Cleary brothers, the Hughes brothers and the Fusco brothers, maintaining a tradition of sibling-led excellence on the ice.

Bertagna manages to transform 250-odd pages of encyclopaedia material into attention-grabbing vignettes. Nonetheless, a few questions peek through the pervading glow.

Why, for instance, do 90 pages elapse before a two-and-a-half page segment on women's ice hockey marks the first piece not to concentrate on male athletes?

And have swarms of angels really peopled the playing fields across the River for the past 134 years?

Then again, Crimson in Triumph is more of a mentality than a chronology, with "Triumph" the key word.

What self-respecting alumnus gives money, year-in and year-out, to a losing cause. Like it or not, success and its fellow traveler, money, have always been the standards by which sports are judged.

Thus football and hockey--the two big revenue generators--fall first in the anthology, and each receives two or three times as much coverage as basketball, with its history of poor finishers and sparse attendance.

But Bertagna does not neglect the outstanding individuals behind both the successes and the failures. It is their story--their triumph, if you will. And Bertagna's as well.