Believe me, the Yale spirit was running high.  The men were playing like demons.  Here was a team that was considered a defeated team before the game.  Here were eleven men who had risen to the occasion and who were slowly, but surely, getting the best of the argument.

Gloom hung heavy over the Princeton stand.  Defeat seemed inevitable.  Of eleven players who started in the game on the Princeton side, eight had been incapacitated by injuries of one kind or another.  Doc Hillebrand, the ever-reliable, All-American tackle, had been compelled to leave the game with a broken collar-bone just before McBride made his touchdown.

I remember well the play in which he was injured and I have resurrected a photograph that was snapped of the game at the moment that he was lying on the ground, knocked out.

[Illustration:  Hillebrand’s last charge]

Bummie Booth, who had stood the strain of the contest wonderfully well, and had played a grand game against Hale, gave way to Horace Bannard, brother of Bill Bannard, the famous Princeton halfback of ’98.

It was no wonder that Princeton was downcast when McBride scored the touchdown and the goal was about to be kicked.

Just then I saw a man in football togs come out from the side lines wearing a blue visor cap.  He was to kick for the goal.  It was an unusual spectacle on a football field.  I rushed up to the referee, Ed Wrightington of Harvard, and called his attention to the man with the cap.  I asked if that man was in the game.

“Why,” he replied with a broad smile, “you ought to know him.  He is the man you have been playing against all along, Gordon Brown.  He only ran into the side lines to get a cap to shade his eyes.”

I am frank to say that it was one on me, but the chagrin wore off when Brown missed the goal, which would have tied the final score, and robbed Princeton of the ultimate victory.

The tide of battle turned toward Yale.  Al Sharpe kicked a goal from the field, from the forty-five yard line.  It was a wonderful achievement.  It is true that circumstances later substituted Arthur Poe for him as the hero of the game, but those who witnessed Sharpe’s performance will never forget it.  The laurels that he won by it were snatched from him by Poe only in the last half-minute of play.  The score was changed by Sharpe’s goal from 6 to 5 in our favor to 10 to 6.  Yale leading.

The half was over.  The score was 10 to 6 against Princeton.  Every Princeton player felt that there was still a real opportunity to win out.  We were all optimistic.  This optimism was increased by the appeals made to the men in the dressing room by the coaches.  It was not long before the team was back on the field more determined than ever to carry the Yale ball back to Princeton.

The last half of this game is everlastingly impressed upon my memory.  Every man that played for Princeton, although eight of them were substitutes, played like a veteran.  I shall ever treasure the memory of the loyal support that those men gave me as captain, and their response to my appeal to stand together and play not only for Princeton but for the injured men on the side-lines whose places they had taken.