Forty years ago, it wasn't only a game

Tommy Lee Jones is among the Harvard football team members interviewed in ''Harvard Beats Yale 29-29.''

That verb in the title is no typo.

In fact, "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29" comes from the most famous headline in the history of Harvard's undergraduate newspaper the Crimson. That headline refers to what remains the most famous football game in Ivy League history. It occurred 40 years ago this Sunday, when Harvard made such a jaw-dropping comeback - scoring 16 points in the final 42 seconds against a much superior Yale team - that it seemed like victory every way but numerically.

No matter how storied or exciting, a football game is still just a football game. Kevin Rafferty, the director of "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29," opening today at the Brattle, recognizes that what gives the game its enduring interest - and what, in turn, makes his documentary so engaging - is the way it ramifies in other contexts.

Rafferty's approach could hardly be simpler. He goes back and forth between footage of the original television broadcast as called by the late Don Gillis to current-day talking-head interviews with players on both sides.

They are, almost without exception, excellent commentators: articulate, reflective, at once proud of their involvement in the game and not unaware of its relative insignificance in any larger scheme of things. Also, they are all white. (Yale's star running back Calvin Hill, an African-American, isn't interviewed.) This underscores how the game's greater import, as the players point out, has to do with its time-capsule aspect.

It was the '60s, after all. Harvard fullback Pat Conway had served as a Marine in Vietnam. The Harvard offensive line had a guy in SDS blocking alongside a guy in ROTC. (Another member of that line was Tommy Lee Jones, who's among the interviewees.) And Yale was still all-male. Brian Dowling, Yale's quarterback, was such a larger-than-life figure he inspired a Yale Daily News cartoonist named Garry Trudeau to come up with a football-playing character named B.D. So you might say, in a sense, the game gets replayed every day on the comics page.

The larger point "Harvard Beats Yale" makes, perhaps, is about the inevitability of loss. Many of these men, now in their early 60s, look terrific. Others, let us say, do not. Either way, all of them look very different from the helmeted young athletes of 40 years ago. A sense of mortality shadows the documentary. On or off the gridiron, time is the only opponent who always wins. Even at Harvard, even at Yale.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.