“This one’s over,” I heard a fan say as he ushered his family out through the gates of Princeton Stadium.

With 13:02 remaining in the fourth quarter, the Harvard football team had scored another touchdown, its fifth of the game, to take a healthy 34-10 lead over Princeton. It appeared almost a foregone conclusion that the heavily-favored Crimson would roll to yet another victory and extend the longest winning streak in the nation to 15.

The season’s only remaining question, it seemed, was whether Harvard would win its four remaining games to repeat as Ivy League champion, and, in doing so, make 2012 the program’s first undefeated campaign in almost a decade.

***

When you cover a team all season, it’s easy to become a fan and difficult to avoid rooting for success. But covering a team is not—cannot—be about that. It’s about the narratives that unfold and the characters who create them.

It’s about the star defensive lineman who perseveres through the deaths of both parents and bouts of homelessness to become the Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year and a legitimate NFL prospect. The quarterback who is too small to be as good as he is and one day hopes to perfect a different kind of Hail Mary, this time as a pastor.

But, even beyond football, it is as much about those who fail as those who succeed. The recruit who never quite gets his shot, relegated to the bench for four long years. The coach who, despite assembling some of the nation’s best recruiting classes, can’t seem to put an elite team together.

These are stories about people, about goals, about teams. And though you’ll find them in the sports section, they’re just as often about something different entirely.

***

In the next five minutes and 19 seconds, Princeton scored not once, but twice, both times successfully converting two-point attempts. The comfortable 24-point lead had narrowed to eight.

Princeton was storming back, and the once-dejected crowd was now reengaged in the game.

***

The Crimson, and my time writing sports, is about other stories, too. Of fall afternoons driving through an ever-changing Northeast, of spring mornings in a small corner of The Crimson making sure this story or that picture is just right.

And, much like the stories we tell, these ones are fundamentally about people, too. Of learning at the hands of a co-Sports Chair whose sheer knack for the craft is unsurpassed by anyone I’ve worked with before or since, or a brother who refuses to shy away from what is right.

***