Rah, Rah, Rah .

At New Haven the boys stormed out of Woolsey Hall full of fire and the love of Old Eli. They swarmed across the Green, lifted a heavy wooden booth off the Courthouse steps as if it were a match box, dumped it in the middle of the trolley tracks.

At Princeton, at 7 a.m., Harvard's big band piled out of its special train on the weed-covered tracks below the station, began its tootling march across Old Nassau's campus. Out from the dormitories spilled Princeton men in pajamas. A few --ex-G.I.s--carried rifles. They got what they wanted from Harvard's band: Princeton tunes.

At Ann Arbor, Mich, under a full vellow moon, 5,000 boys & girls, chanting and howling Hail to the Victors, swarmed all over town, turned the Pretzel Bell into a roaring bedlam, went on to. dance at the Union.

At Los Angeles, thousands lined Westwood Boulevard while batteries of searchlights and bursting skyrockets poked at a full moon. Into the fan-shaped outdoor theater of the University of California at Los Angeles came a parade of 60 floats, half a dozen of them on the theme of a U.C.L.A. bruin making hamburger out of a Stanford Indian.

Bigger & Better. After four drab war seasons, the football weekend was back. The Big Game was again something to anticipate, prepare for, and see--in a slight haze induced by sentimentalism, alcohol, and the sight of thousands of chrysanthemums on fur coats.

Out on the field, the game was faster, more rugged than ever (see SPORT). The fans had something to see. In Yale's Bowl, filled (except for a few seats) for the first time since 1937, about 65,000 sat through drizzle and downpour and gave their loudest, longest cheers to a Negro fullback. At South Bend, 55,452 swarmed over the town--including many loyal Notre Dame buffs who had never got beyond high school but would travel hundreds of miles to see "their team." Said one from Massachusetts: "Looks like the old days, only more so."

The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum had the biggest crowd of the day--90,803.

Older & Soberer. One thing had not returned--the sloppy drinking of the raccoon-coat and hip-flask era. The post-game crowds gathered nostalgically at their favorite spots--Mory's, the Old Heidelberg and Hofbrau in New Haven; the Yankee Doodle Taproom in Princeton; Metzger's and Floutz's in Ann Arbor. But they saw little student shenanigans. Many of Michigan's coeds broke dates with their steadies to go to strictly nonalcoholic parties with some of the 414 West Point cadets who came with the team. In Madison, where more than once in the past the cops had had to cool off Wisconsin students with tear gas, Langdon Street was deserted by 11 p.m. There was a good reason for student restraint: more than half the boys were war veterans, older than prewar undergraduates.

From now through Thanksgiving millions of Americans would shape their lives to the Big Game. They would scramble for tickets, take long drives in bumper-to-bumper traffic, get cold, wet feet, have too many drinks and get that tired feeling on Mondays. But they would love it.

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