“The kick is up, and it’s good.”

They’re words that have, over the course of a century of football, become an unmistakable part of the sport’s vernacular. But in recent seasons, the phrase all but disappeared from Cambridge, prompting confusion on those few occasions it was muttered, as if spoken in a foreign tongue.

“I was only aware of what was going on last year,” freshman placekicker Matt Schindel said. “I could tell by the weird scores that something was messed up.”

As Schindel inferred, Harvard’s field goal unit was downright awful in 2003, converting on just four of its 12 tries—up from the two of seven one year earlier—while botching seven extra points.

But even those statistics don’t tell the whole truth. Crimson coach Tim Murphy would, rather than send out his special teams for the gridiron equivalent of Russian roulette, take his chances with his offense on fourth down or attempting a two-point conversion.

Not this year.

Schindel has not only improved upon the lackluster performances of his immediate predecessors, but also propelled himself into the Harvard record books, tying Charlie Brickley ’15 for the program’s single-season field goal mark with 13. The freshman has missed just four three-point tries en route to matching the 92-year-old record, while converting 29 of 32 extra points.

“If you just look at our red zone capability, in five of the last six games, we’ve been 100 percent in the red zone and that’s a reflection of the whole offense and him,” Murphy said. “[Schindel] gives you a little more confidence and the flexibility to do other things.”

Selling a fake field goal among them.

With one successful try already under his belt against Penn last weekend, Schindel lined up for the record breaker, which would have come from 35 yards out.

The Quakers crashed the line of scrimmage, hoping to bat the ball down. Of course, Schindel never attempted his kick, nor had he ever intended to.

Holder Rob Balkema leapt from his crouched position and fired a touchdown strike to linebacker Bobby Everett, crushing Penn’s title hopes.

“You think anyone was thinking about a fake field goal when Matt Schindel was lining up out there?” Murphy asked. “This guy’s deadly. You knew they were going to go for the all-out block.”

Given the Crimson’s history, that certainly wouldn’t have been the case at season’s start. Murphy professed that he’d discovered “a special kicker,” but not even he could have expected the consistency Schindel has provided.

More than anything, Murphy appeared to be setting his kicker up for a fall similar to those witnessed in previous years.