This entry is written by Carl Ehrlich, a football student-athlete at Harvard. Check out Carl's previous two blog entries: Summer Dogs and R.I.C.E.

"There's nothing like playing under the lights."

That was always part of my recruiting speech to the considerable number of athletes in my school district (in suburban Maryland) who were considering forgoing the public high school football experience to play at prestigious private schools (and Saturday afternoon games). "Sure, Al Gore's kid gets to wear a blazer and goes to a school with a chapel, but we have lights, dude."

Six years later, I'll still raising the lights issue to incoming recruits; only this time I use it to draw athletes towards the prestigious private school.

Any Opening Day (or Night) gets you to look back, and after the game on Friday night, my roommates and I were talking about everything that had changed since the "glory days" of high school football - and everything that had stayed the same. While this type of reflection might be more fit for a "Dazed and Confused" deleted scene than a GoCrimson.com blog, I thought I would talk about a few different areas of interest.

In high school, I thought the kids that we played against were big. Because team rosters weren't on-line, the only way to gauge before the game how big the opposing kids were was to compare them to the teams they were playing against. Often we relied on second-hand accounts from a buddy who might have seen a kid from the rival team outside the movie theatre that summer.

While no one in the count(r)y could have been bigger than my best friend on my high school team (a 6 foot 6, 320-pund Baby Hughie who's now terrorizing people at Division II powerhouse Shepherd College), we still spent much of the week speculating what the team would look like when we got onto the field.

In college, we know the kids we are playing are big. Granted, we play in the Ivy League, which is a league of smaller, faster linemen who are more geared towards zone than power football. But this isn't to say that I'm lining up against small kids. On Friday, I lined up against the Holy Cross right guard who was a roster-listed 6 foot 6, 292-punds... and he was the small guard! Teammate and captain Matt Curtis had the privilege of lining up across from their left guard who was a whopping 350 pounds! They could've put a third number on his jersey.

With the exception of the occasional "pad monster" (a player who wears pads under his shoulder pads with a big neck roll to appear bigger - the football equivalent of heel lifts), the teams we play against on Saturdays have players big enough that the imperative question is no longer if they'll be big, but how big.

The night before a game in high school, I would sit on the floor in my basement and stretch while I watched video (remember VHS?) of the other team (that I usually purloined from the coach's office). Looking back, I did this more out of superstition than practicality because the videos looked like they were filmed by the directors of "Blair Witch Project" with prehistoric camcorders. The most I could really do was add up the run/pass tally marks to look for tendencies.

The videos I watch now are so good they look like "Plant Earth: Gridirons of the Northeast" - I keep waiting for Sigourney Weaver to narrate.

Along with the DVD of the other team that I am given each week, I'm also given a scouting report that the Secretary of Defense would find mind-boggling. We have the tendencies of other teams sorted by formation, down, distance, temperature, cloud formation, favorite color, and cleat size. Naturally, we burn all of these intelligence reports after each game, except for our offensive linemen - whom eat them.

But the greatest constant throughout all of these years of football has been how sweet it is to play in your home stadium, in front of a huge crowd, and to be a part of a fourth quarter comeback that everyone who saw it will remember - all of which I got to experience last Friday night against Holy Cross.

You simply can't beat 20,000 people showing up to cheer. And during our final drive, our final defensive series, and when Chris Pizzotti knelt to end the game (an ironic way to beat Holy Cross), you could hear the 19,500 of them who came to cheer for us. Thanks to everyone for coming out to the game!

Next stop, Providence - the city, of course - for a date with Brown, my pick for the sleeper in our league.