Surely it is a tribute to the Harvard-Yale game’s enduring status that climate-change activists chose it for their disruptive (but thoroughly peaceful) protest Saturday. A public demonstration requires an observant public. So, while those two egghead institutions long ago ceased to prioritize football; while the NCAA’s sports-industrial complex essentially drew a chalk outline around the Ivy League’s major-league status more than 40 years ago, Harvard-vs.-Yale still attracts a crowd.

It is a bit arrogant, of course, too snobbishly exclusive, the way the Harvards and Yales continue to call it “The Game,” as if there were no other of such importance. But there were 44,898 witnesses at the Yale Bowl for the 136th renewal of their annual duel. That was eight times the average attendance at Yale’s previous five home games this season.

That was enough for a quorum. Enough to affect the message from 200 protesters who stormed the field at halftime calling on the two elite institutions to divest their massive investments in fossil fuels. “Nobody wins,” some banners carried onto the field warned. “Yale & Harvard are complicit in climate injustice.”

Of course there were cries of condemnation for the “inappropriate” setting. Officials at the two elite schools, as well as the Ivy League office, harrumphed that while they were passionate believers in free speech, they found it “regrettable”—according to an Ivy League email—“that the orchestrated protest came during a time when fellow students were participating in a collegiate career-defining contest and an annual tradition when thousands gather around the world to enjoy and celebrate the storied traditions of both football programs and universities.”

Not the venue, in other words. Which is the same kind of inverted reasoning that granted Colin Kaepernick the right to protest police brutality and racial inequality—but not during the National Anthem before high-profile NFL games. Too many people might see him and be forced to think about the issue.

College theoretically is about promoting critical thinking, and both Harvard and Yale brand themselves as leading bastions of learning and justice. All nine members of the current Supreme Court attended either Harvard or Yale. Six U.S. Presidents went to Harvard; five to Yale. (Once, at The Game, Harvard’s band spoofed 350-pound President William Howard Taft—a Yale man—for getting stuck in the White House bathtub.)

So here was something of a teaching moment Saturday, a chance for concerned students to stoke awareness of what they believe is their schools’ misguided contribution to the carbon emissions problem. Their occupy-halftime movement resulted in a few dozen arrests and plenty of social media commentary and a delay of almost an hour in re-starting the game. (Sorry: The Game.)

Because the Yale Bowl is the rare college stadium which didn’t join the 1980s business model of installing lights to satisfy television, the teams played into virtual darkness, a quarter-hour after sundown. But that only enhanced the football drama, their scuffle finishing in the gloaming after a second overtime period. Yale won, 50-43, and one of its giddy players dismissed the inconvenience of the protest by declaring that his mates were prepared to play “until tomorrow.”

Part of the irony is that Yale was America’s Original Football Factory—the Alabama of the early 1900s—a perennial national champion prior to World War I, fielding All-Americans (possibly semi-professionals rather than ordinary students) and producing a lineage of influential coaches. The Yale Bowl, when it opened in 1914—the biggest and best of its kind—was called a “handsome and remarkable monument to the cult of the pigskin.”

It’s just that not since 1968 has Yale, Harvard or The Game gotten any attention to speak of. That was the year that Harvard scored 16 points in the final 42 seconds to salvage an improbable tie and led to the Harvard Crimson’s memorable headline, “Harvard beats Yale, 29-29.”

Hmmm. Nobody won? Developments during The Game in 2019 might have presented an opportunity to think about a final score.