Take a step back, and remember where you were a month ago. Chances are, you were giddy about the prospect of the 120th playing of The Game having title implications.

Let’s rewind to Oct. 25, when the current top three in the Ivy League standings—Penn, Yale and Harvard—were each undefeated in league play.

Yale, which was prepared to take on the Quakers at Philadelphia’s Franklin Field that day, had lost one non-conference game at that point—to current powerhouse No. 6 Colgate—but overall looked strong, averaging 41 points per game.

Penn, on the other hand, had not yet faced a formidable opponent—it had beaten No. 19 Lehigh, but the Mountain Hawks have since dropped from the rankings—and had narrowly escaped an upset to Bucknell two weeks before.

Harvard, at 6-0, looked invincible.

But oh, how the fates have changed.

In that critical Oct. 25 Yale-Penn game, Yale forced overtime but eventually succumbed to the Quakers, 34-31.

Since then, Penn has run the table on the Ivies, getting stronger by the week and eventually clinching the title. Yale has been respectable, but lost one game to Brown.

And Harvard? The Crimson has gone 0-3 since that date.

So the promise that The Game once held a month ago is gone. One would be mistaken to downplay what is on the line at Yale Bowl, however. The stakes are still high for the Crimson—very high. Here’s why.

A quick glance at the Ivy League standings reveals two things. For one, Harvard (6-3, 3-3 Ivy) is tied for third place with Columbia (4-5, 3-3). Two, the Crimson is also tied with Dartmouth (4-5, 3-3).

And with the Lions at home against Brown, and with the Big Green playing Princeton, those two perennial cellar-dwellers have a good chance of both finishing ahead of Harvard with a Crimson loss.

The implications of this would be staggering. Neither team has finished ahead of Harvard since 1996. For some perspective, President Clinton was still serving his first term in the White House that year, Kerri Strug made her famous vault on a bum ankle in Atlanta and Ted Kaczynski ’62 was arrested.

Now, it would be wrong to say that Dartmouth, under head coach John Lyons, has been an unsuccessful football program. In fact, the Big Green captured four Ivy League titles during the ’90s—more than any other team. But from 1998-2002, that same program rolled off a miserable record of 10-39, winning a grand total of six Ivy League games.

Columbia, on the other hand, has not won an Ivy League title since 1961 and has had exactly three winning seasons since Harvard coach Tim Murphy was born in 1957.