NEW HAVEN, Conn. — “We’re going to celebrate as a team. We’ll be together,” the Harvard senior and quarterback who became a starter this season, Chris Pizzotti, said before boarding a bus that would return his football team to Cambridge as Ivy League champions who ruined Yale’s undefeated season, beating them at the Yale Bowl 37-6. Their victory meal for the ride home consisted of beef, chicken, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese — all crammed into one plate — and orange Gatorade.

Seven hours earlier, Yale graduate Richard Sperry was sprinkling herbs over raw steaks on his Weber grill, a recipe provided by a French fighter pilot. Next to him was his tailgate co-host Roger Cheever, a Harvard graduate, waiting for his wife to arrive with Commencement Punch, made of dark rum, tea, honey, vanilla extract, and cinnamon. The friends met in officer candidate school in 1969, before serving in Vietnam. They are members of the class of 1968 and have hosted a joint Yale-Harvard (or, depending on who you talk to, Harvard-Yale) tailgate for 35 years.

“We’re always here together,” Mr. Cheever said. “It’s a friendship that endures everything, all the vicissitudes of life.”

RELATED: More Photos

This past weekend’s festivities proved once again that camaraderie, not victory, is the most important part of the experience, and friendship transcends the Yale-Harvard rivalry. (At least that’s the conclusion favored by this reporter, who is a Yale graduate.)

“Seeing old friends is fabulous. I’ve lived overseas for 33 of the last 37 years so I’ve missed my friends,” the American ambassador to China, Clark Randt, said at a tailgate with his roommates from Yale’s class of 1968.

Some people — like Ron Vaccaro, a 2004 graduate of Yale who announces the games on Yale’s radio station — did actually care about the game. But he had found the long view by the time he was back at his desk at NBC at 30 Rockefeller Center. “This is not the first loss I’ve seen, and I’m sure it won’t be the last one,” Mr. vaccaro said. “This one is not the most heartbreaking, since Yale was never in it.”

One minute and eight seconds into the game, Harvard scored its first touchdown. A second touchdown came with one minute and 18 seconds left in the quarter. Harvard had two more touchdowns in the second quarter, a field goal in the third quarter, and its final touchdown a minute and a half into the fourth quarter.

With four minutes left in the game, Yale’s Gio Christodoulou ran 87 yards to score the team’s only touchdown.

The statistics show the strength of Harvard’s game: Harvard had 25 first downs, Yale 6; Harvard possessed the ball for nearly twice the time Yale did; Harvard had 10 out of 21 third down conversions, while Yale had one out of 13.

“I have no real explanation. They got on a roll,” Yale’s coach, Jack Siedlecki, said.

“The bottom line was a combination of really great emotion, execution, and preparation,” Harvard’s coach, Tim Murphy, said after the game.

Asked to explain the reasons why thousands of alumni return for two days of singing group concerts, cocktail parties, dinners, and the football contest, the dean of Yale College and a professor of psychology, Peter Salovey, offered a theory invented by social psychologist Robert Cialdini of the University of Arizona: basking in reflected glory. “The greatest evidence is that if the team wins, everyone will be wearing their Yale shirts the next day,” Mr. Salovey said.

Rather than act like sore losers, Yalies, who had the honor of hosting Harvard, found other reasons to keep on the sweatshirts and the stickers printed with the slogan, “I’m a proud Yalie.” Alumnus Thomas Israel returned to a fully outfitted Winnebago (and to a daughter, Emily, with a degree from Yale, who is enrolled in graduate school at Harvard). Cary Koplin took pride in his 40th reunion blazer and his Yale grad son, Bryan, who is the director of electronic trading at Goldman Sachs.

Some stayed focused on the honors passed out Friday evening at the Blue Leadership Ball held at Payne Whitney Gymnasium. Alumni celebrated included the chairman of Franklin Resources and former Yale football player, Charles Johnson; chief executive of Boeing, W. James McNerney; a managing director at Korn/Ferry International, Anne Keating, and the dean of the Howard University School of Law, Kurt Schmoke.

Alumni celebrated the changes in New Haven. “There are so many places to eat and shop,” the communications director of Baruch College, Carol Abrams, a 1986 Yale graduate who had not been back to campus in years, said outside an Urban Outfitters.

Ignoring what happened on the field, Yalies took pride in the glory of the Yale Bowl itself. Built in 1914 for $750,000, the Bowl looked grand after a $17 million renovation, part of the university’s $300 billion Yale Tomorrow fund-raising campaign.

And who wouldn’t want to bask in the reflected glory of the class of 1954? The class gave $12 million to the Bowl project, and has given much more to Yale, having grown its fund from a few hundred thousand into more than $100 million under the investment management of one of its own, Joseph McNay of Essex Investment Management Company.

Mr. McNay was basking in another form of reflected glory, of the familial kind. His son, Stuart, a Yale graduate, has won a spot to compete in sailing at the Olympics this summer.

agordon@nysun.com