{shortcode-820a0837c5f07d283399ff393280d09c45706de4}

The journey ends here.

After the graduation of 14 All-Ivy players, an epidemic of injuries, and nine weeks of bruising play, Harvard football once again stands on the brink of an Ivy League championship.

Beat Yale, and the Crimson will secure a fourth-straight Ancient Eight title for the first time ever.

Lose, and Harvard will go down as a team that squandered considerable talent and nullified a nine-year winning streak in The Game.

The pressure is high, and by no means is the Crimson perfect. The program has lost twice—to Holy Cross and Penn—and eked out its last three victories by a combined 12 points.

Still, Harvard (7-2, 5-1 Ivy) has plodded on. At the start of the season, the Crimson shouldered immense expectations and strove for a historic goal. Now everything has reduced to a single contest.

Yes, the journey ends here—at Harvard Stadium, on Saturday afternoon, and in the 133rd playing of The Game.

“The main thing is pride,” captain Sean Ahern said. “There’s so much pride between the two programs. It goes back over 100 years…. It’s for the guys who came before and built the program to what it is now.”

Last week, the Crimson could have clinched a piece of the Ancient Eight crown by downing second-place Penn. But the Quakers defended their home turf, scoring two touchdowns in the final 15 seconds to claim an epic 27-14 win.

For the moment, then, Harvard, Penn, and Princeton each possess one conference loss—which means that, for each program, a victory this weekend would lock up a share of the championship.

The Quakers play at Cornell. The Tigers host Dartmouth. And Crimson players? Well, they have a matchup of their own.

“Every year, no matter what the records are or what’s at stake, Harvard-Yale just has a different feel about it,” senior quarterback Joe Viviano said. “That’s really why you come here.”

In the long history of The Game, no program has ever built a winning streak as long as the one that Harvard now enjoys. Nine games. And if the Crimson wins, then it will push that streak to double digits for the first time.

Harvard’s destruction of Yale plays into a larger narrative of dominance. The Crimson has not had a losing campaign since 1998. In 23 seasons with Harvard, Murphy has grabbed nine Ivy titles; one more in 2016 would tie him for most all time with Carm Cozza, the Bulldogs’ coach from 1965 to 1996.