“You have to love to hit to play linebacker, to enjoy playing football,” Balestracci says.

And when Balestracci hits, he hits hard. Every hit is designed to send a message, every tackle a warning not to even think about heading his way with a play call again.

“You’re going to hit that guy across from you as hard as you can every time,” Balestracci says. “You’re gong to let him know that you’re there and you’re not going anywhere, that you’re going to be there the whole game.”

But anyone can plant a hit. Balestracci can make an opponent feel it before it is ever even delivered.

“He tries to intimidate,” junior linebacker Bobby Everett says. “He’ll go out there and hit a guy face to face and try to drive him through the ground, which is how you have to do it. He punches at the ball and tries to get into the other guy’s head a little. When he makes a big hit for a loss, he’ll stand over the guy and let everyone know.”

Talk about a message that’s hard to miss.

With Balestracci, playing defense is just as much about making the hit as getting his opponent to fear the hit, to sense it coming and to panic and lose control of the situation.

Which helps the Crimson’s second leading tackler on the team’s all-time list do what he needs to be doing, as he did against Penn.

“Every time we hit their running back [Sam Mathews], we tried to drive him back, put him on his back,” Balestracci says. “We had to let him know that if you’re going to run the ball, we’re going to hit you hard and we’re going to hit you hard every single play, every time you touch the ball.”

So when the game’s intensity reached its fevered pitch in the fourth quarter, Mathews was primed to make a mistake.

And Balestracci was ready to elevate his game and deliver a final crushing blow. Punching and tearing at Mathews with the game on the line, he looked as though about to tear the helpless tailback to shreds. Not surprisingly, Mathews caved first.

Balestracci broke through into the offensive backfield and all of a sudden there was no place to turn.

Out pops the ball. In comes the Harvard offense.

Though the hits he will remember are not necessarily the biggest or flashiest or the ones that a fan could hear 30 yards away, that is not what matters to Balestracci.

“You just have to look at it as some plays are bigger than others,” he says. “It wasn’t even a tremendous hit or anything [when] we forced the fumble against Lafayette that completely turned the game around. We were sputtering on offense, we weren’t really doing much and on defense we were pretty iffy all game. While it wasn’t a great hit, I took a swipe at the ball, knocked it out, and the momentum of the game completely flipped around.”