Thereafter it had all a grim sameness, except, in a strange way, it seemed to him that nothing that had gone before counted—that everything they were fighting for was to keep their goal-line inviolate. Nothing new seemed to happen. When he went fiercely into a mêlée, finding his man somehow, or felt the rush of bodies about him as he managed each time to get clear his punt, he had the same feeling:
"Why, I've done this before."
A dozen times they stopped the Princeton advance, sometimes far away and sometimes near, once within the five-yard line. Every moment, now, some one cried wearily:
"What's the time?"
The gray of November twilights, the haze that settles over the struggles of the gridiron like the smoke of a battle-field, began to close in. And then a sudden fumble, a blocked kick, and by a swift turn of luck it was Yale's ball for the first time in Princeton's territory. One or two subs came rushing in eagerly from the side lines. Every one was talking at once:
"What's the time?"
"Five minutes more."
"Get together, Yale!"
"Show 'em how!"
"Ram it through them!"