Years from now, whenever the Harvard faithful look back on a season once filled with such promise, they will not curse Dartmouth’s Andrew Hall or Columbia’s Prosper Nwokocha as the players who ruined the Crimson’s perfect season.

To them, the culprit will forever be the unknown Cornell defender whose helmet fractured the fifth metacarpal of Ryan Fitzpatrick’s throwing hand—and with it, the dream of an Ivy title.

It’s still hard to believe that something so small could stop something so big; that a broken hand would be strong enough to break the hearts and hopes of so many.

But it was.

You see, Fitzpatrick is as important to the Crimson as a player can be in a sport where 22 men take the field at once.

“What you don’t know until you see him compete is how tough he is, how confident he is, how that attitude that he has really rubs off on everybody else,” Harvard coach Tim Murphy says. “What you don’t understand or don’t know is that there’s an intangible there that along with his speed, his versatility, his strong arm, makes him a tremendous catalyst for our offensive success.”

If you really want to know why Ryan Fitzpatrick is so important to this football team, forget, for a moment, the statistics.

The pass efficiency rating.

The rushing yards per carry.

The massive amounts of total offense he accumulates in every way imaginable.

If you really want to know why he is so important to this football team, you don’t need to know any of that. You just need to know Ryan.

* * *

You need to know Fitzpatrick the way his teammates do, especially his classmates. The guys that have been there since the first day of summer football years ago, when the unheralded blond kid from Arizona was buried four-deep on the depth chart.

Back then, the self-described “straight-edged” Fitzpatrick was—like all rookies—pretty nondescript in practice, leaving the coaching staff undecided as to his potential.

“We knew he could throw the ball and we knew that he was a good athlete,” Murphy says.“But he was such a quiet kid that sometimes we really weren’t sure if he had the personality and the charisma to be a great leader.”