And though Harvard allowed 31 points, that number just as easily could have been 38, with the Bears’ final drive stalled near the goal line as time winded down.

Indeed, in Saturday’s offensive gunfight, when Brown Stadium became the O.K. Corral, when at one point, seven of eight drives between the two teams culminated in touchdowns, the Crimson came up with enough stops to get the job done.

“We’ve got some work to do. There’s no question,” Harvard coach Tim Murphy said. “And we’ll get better. We have been kind of a bend-but-don’t-break team, and we want to be a team that can be a shutdown team.”

That bend-but-don’t-break mentality worked well enough against Brown. It will probably work well enough next week against Holy Cross, which now has lost to both Brown and Dartmouth.

But it may not work so well two weeks from now against Cornell—which made Yale look silly this weekend in a 45-6 romp—and its quarterback Jeff Mathews, who’s averaging 415 passing yards per game.

So in a fortnight, if the secondary doesn’t shore up soon, the bend-but-don’t-break approach may just, well, snap.

—Staff writer Robert S. Samuels can be reached at robertsamuels@college.harvard.edu.

—Follow him on Twitter @bobbysamuels.