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Blue Hopes, Gray Stats
The fall was not kind to Eli’s teams, and a chance for a last-minute reprieve was tipped out of reach.
February 1996
by Troy Flint ’97
Troy Flint, a junior in Timothy Dwight College, is Sports Editor of the Yale Daily News.
Yale’s athletic history is replete with images of Eli males covering their College in glory. Over the years, names like Larry Kelley, Chris Dudley, and Don Schollander have been synonymous with Bulldog-ism on the field, on the court, and in the pool. But as the last leaves fell from the trees this fall, it was the women of Eli who salvaged a measure of pride for the season, securing the two winning records out of the 11 fall sports.
Rebounding from an abysmal season a year ago, field hockey stunned its competitors with a stellar campaign that included a seven-game winning streak, a third-place Ivy finish, and a berth in the prestigious East Coast Athletic Conference postseason tournament. Women’s volleyball enjoyed similar success, recording one of the finest seasons in its history, at one point winning eight consecutive games before taking third place in the regular season standings.
Following a disappointing 1994, women’s soccer experienced a major revival this year under new coach
then-undefeated Princeton the weekend before. Harvard had not won a game in or out of the League.
In the end—literally—the contest came down to a competition between two players: Yale quarterback Chris Hetherington ’96, and Harvard tailback Eion Hu (who is also, fortunately, a senior). Hetherington connected on 15 of 26 passes and rushed for 69 yards in his farewell performance for the Elis. His favorite target was senior receiver Jon Aram, who would finish a brilliant campaign with seven catches for 126 yards against the Crimson. But it was Dave Iwan’s 13-yard touchdown catch and a John Lafferty field goal that gave the Elis a 9–7 halftime lead.
After the teams traded touchdowns in the third quarter and the opening minutes of the final period, neither team would score again until Eli tailback Kena Heffernan leaped over the pile from two yards out, providing the game with its fifth lead change and the Bulldogs with a 21–16 advantage. “After my last score, I thought we had a good chance,” Heffernan said in the aftermath. “But I didn’t think the game was over because we had come back from more dire situations ourselves.”
Heffernan’s second touchdown of the day sent Yale’s student cheering section into a frenzy, but the Crimson quickly demonstrated the wisdom of Heffernan’s caution. Vin Ferrara, the Cantabs’ senior quarterback, had been benched when Harvard’s offense faltered during the third quarter, but at this critical moment he was recalled for another chance. Facing second and five from Yale’s 38, Ferrara rifled a pass down the middle of the field. In what may have been the mishap of the match for Yale, the ball was tipped by two Bulldog defenders before landing in the hands of Harvard receiver Adam Golla, who went down on the Yale 15-yard line.
“I think that was an act of God more than anything else,” Ferrara said afterwards. “We’ve had so many tipped balls go the wrong way this year. I mean, if you watched it on our films, it’s unbelievable. So when that happened, I knew we were going to win.”
They did, in one of the better displays of comeback grit in the long history of the contest. With a mere 29 seconds remaining (does the figure have a familiar ring?), the elusive Hu scampered across the goal line and into Harvard history. His three-yard dash was one of the shortest—but undoubtedly the most significant—runs on a day that included 33 carries and 177 yards. It emptied the Harvard stands onto the field, and cast an additional layer of damp over all but the most sportsmanlike Yale fans.
“It didn’t really hit me then, but now I look back on it as a very sad day,” Heffernan said after the game. “It was the first time I’ve lost personally to Harvard, and it was very difficult that we didn’t have a game after that and there are no more practices. I tried my best to play my heart out and leave it all out on the field, but losing still hurts.”
The pain was not without its gain. Anyone who still complains about being bored by Ivy League football wasn’t in the stands for this one—or, for that matter, the ones against Brown and Princeton. They were thrillers. And there will be more. |
