Students purchase clappers in front of the Science Center during the Undergraduate Council pep rally yesterday.

For one Saturday each year, Harvard students unite to spend a day in revelry, drinking and partying in the name of school pride.

This year, however, a set of new regulations threaten to stifle The Game—not the football competition between Harvard and Yale, but the tailgate that has often defined the day for students.

Tailgate has traditionally been a time for Harvard to come together, says Adam Kalamchi ’05, Kirkland House Committee (HoCo) chair.

“I think it’s definitely less about the football game, and more that everyone at Harvard, for one weekend, does something as a single community, pretending that we’re at ‘Harvard State,’ not Harvard,” says Kalamchi.

But at tomorrow’s tailgate students will be grounded, deprived of their traditional U-Haul roof dance floors. And those of legal drinking age will be sporting a new accessory: a wristband.

As the University expands across the Charles River, Harvard has come under the scrutiny of the Boston Police Department (BPD), which is intent on strictly enforcing drinking rules at The Game’s tailgate as it does at other local colleges’ events.

The U-Hauls have been banned by the athletic department, still sour from shelling out about $50,000 to fix fields torn up by the vehicles following 2002’s Game, according to Undergraduate Council President Matthew W. Mahan ’05.

While Harvard and Yale undergraduates recognize that their colleges and student leaders are working to make the event as enjoyable as it was in the past, some say that the new administrative oversight has dampened The Game’s appeal.

“Basically, it kind of blows,” Quincy HoCo chair Sean N. Karamchandani ’04-’05 says of the new restrictions. “We’re asking for two days out of the whole year where we can be a regular school. Let’s party hard and have a good time.”

THE REAL GAME

Yale senior Katie E. McKeegan calls The Game “more than just football.”

“Some of my favorite college memories are from last year’s tailgate, simply sitting on top of a van with my friends, sipping beer and watching the crowd,” she writes in an e-mail.

“Here, at Yale, I think that celebration is allowed to happen to its fullest,” McKeegan writes. “It looks like at Harvard that celebration is going to be stunted and twisted into unnecessary conflicts and subterfuge. That’s not the way I wanted my last Game to be.”

Yale junior Philip A. Levin also stressed the importance of the tailgate over football.

“Let’s be serious here—we’re playing Ivy League football. It’s not anything students really want to watch. People are there to tailgate, people are there to be in that environment,” says Levin, who is the social activities committee co-chair for Saybrook College, one of Yale’s dorms.