With great expectations, I open the envelope.

I'm a senior. I've paid my dues--around $80,000 worth. To clinch matters, one of my former roommates starts for the football team. Another suited up for a couple of seasons. The least the Athletic Department can do--or so I assume--is reciprocate with some tasty seats.

I take one look. I say to myself, rather pretentiously: "Angry senior, you really got crappy seats."

As. luck would have it, I speak loudly enough for a friend to overhear. "How bad are they?" he asks.

I reply that I have just spent $80,012 to sit in row PP. Not only is that all the way through the alphabet--it's two-thirds the way through it all over again.

Now, I must confess that I really don't have any clue where row PP really is. But I sense that I ought to invest in some Kleenex stock, pronto.

A few naive friends try to console me, offering up heartwarming and bone-chilling tales about the stirring Cambridge-New Haven rivalry.

While these simple souls chatter on, I take the time to reflect. Why have I been so badly screwed? Am I being penalized for poor attendance at past football games? Am I being nailed for not knowing the lyrics to "10,000 Men of Harvard?"

Or--most damning of all--do people realize I'll probably tailgate so hard that I won't know where I'm sitting, anyway?

Perhaps, after 50 years and significant contributions to the Crimson coffers, I may get the chance to move up--to the level of a single, solitary P, if I'm lucky.

Or maybe I'll save myself some money and some aggravation--not to mention 50 years--and invest in a pair of binoculars.

Unfortunately, due to a rather limited budget, these options may have to wait. Until then, I'll sit back and ponder why it is that the only people who can afford good seats are the same folks who can afford to buy binoculars.

In the end, after much introspection, I've accepted the fact that the Harvard-Yale thing is not about The Game.

It's about atmosphere.

And in row PP that's exactly what I'll be getting--atmosphere, lots of atmosphere.

Paul D. Tropp is a Crimson staff writer.