The backup quarterback scrambled furiously out of the pocket, looking right, then left.

“I had a sense that I was kind of protected,” Champi said. “I expected to get hit, and then there was the sensation that there was a force field around me, and then the voice inside me said, ‘Okay, now move.’”

Champi moved, saw Gatto out of the corner of his eye, and floated the ball to the halfback in the end zone a split second before a Yale lineman brought him down.

Touchdown, Harvard. Harvard Stadium erupted.

“I got tackled by three Yale guys and jumped on by 300 fans,” Gatto remembered.

But Yale still had the two-point edge.

When the referees finally herded the crowds back behind the chalk, Champi and company lined up for the two-point conversion.

“It was as if the world had just stopped,” Cramer said. “It makes you wonder if there was this otherworldly kind of thing going on that made it inevitable that this second two-point conversion was going to happen.”

The Crimson elected to try the same play as the previous conversion and touchdown. Champi looked to Varney, threaded the ball to Varney, and this time, he hung on. 29-29, Harvard.

‘THE MOST WINNING TIE IN HISTORY’

“The stadium just emptied,” Cramer recalled. “The Yale sideline was just stunned. I think there were three heart attack victims that day in the stands among Yale fans. Harvard fans poured out.”

Dowling, who played safety in high school, had asked his coach to put him in on defense in the final minute. Cozza refused, and the unbeaten quarterback watched from the sidelines as his unblemished record slipped away.

“It was very frustrating to end our college careers on a down note, but it wasn’t a loss,” Dowling said. “So that was the consolation. Some newspaper reporters after The Game came up to me and asked how it felt to finally lose a game, and I said, ‘I thought it was a tie.’”

Dowling would join a number of his teammates that year, including Hill, in the NFL draft, but that day, the success was all Harvard’s. The scoreboard may have reflected a tie, but to both teams, it felt like anything but.

“It felt worse than a loss,” Goldsmith said. “It was surreal. I don’t remember coming off of the field. I do remember their locker room was noisy. They were high-fiving each other, and you could have heard a pin drop in our locker room.”