Not for five seasons, not since the year before Hicks, Pudge, Butch, Beef
and the others of 1919 were Freshmen, had the Gold and Green corraled that
greatest glory, The State Intercollegiate Football Championship! In Captain
Butch's Sophomore year, he had flung his bulk into the fray, training,
sacrificing, fighting like a Trojan, only to see the pennant lost by a
scant three inches, as Jack Merritt's forty-yard drop-kick for the goal
that would have won the Championship struck the cross-bar and bounded back
into the field. And the past season-old Bannister could still vision that
tragic scene of the biggest game.

The students could picture Captain Brewster, with the Bannister eleven a
few yards from Ballard's goal-line, and the touchdown that would give the
Gold and Green that supreme glory. One minute to play; Deacon Radford had
given Butch the pigskin, and like a berserker, he fought entirely through
the scrimmage. But a kick on the head had blinded him, in the melee--free
of tacklers, with the goal-line, victory, and the Championship so near, he
staggered, reeled blindly, crashed into an upright, and toppled backward,
senseless on the field, while the Referee's whistle announced the end of
the game, and glory to Ballard. Even then, after the first terrible shock
of the loss, of the cruel blow fate dealt the Gold and Green two
successive seasons, the slogan was: "Next year--Bannister will win the
Championship--next year!"

It was now "next year!" Losing only Jack Merritt, Babe McCabe and Heavy
Hughes from the line-up, and having Monty Merrlweather and Bunch Bingham,
fully as good, Coach Corridan's Gold and Green eleven, before the season
started, seemed a better fighting machine than even the one of the year
before. But when the irrepressible T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., in some
mysterious fashion making good his rash vow to produce a smashing full-back
that can't be stopped, towed that stolid, blond Colossus, Thor, to old