Every time the cadets scored they stood up across the field to taunt us, waving their clean and pressed white handkerchiefs. But at four in the afternoon we had the last wave.

I was a freshman at my first Lions' football game in Baker's field and by the time we, my dad and I, boarded the IRT express back to Brooklyn we could barely talk above a whisper. But what we witnessed that historic afternoon was worth a case of laryngitis.

Army, undefeated in its last 32 games, were 13-point favorites, and it looked bad as we came into the fourth quarter trailing seven to 20. But the gold dust kids, Bill Swiaki and Lou Kusserow, joined captain Gene Rossides to do the impossible. You've probably seen Swiaki's diving catch replayed a hundred times in slo-mo. No, Bill clearly has the ball wrapped in both his arms just the instant before his knee hits the ground in the end zone. We all went crazy.

That touchdown brought us within six points and minutes later Lou Kusserow, after a brilliant march down field, took the ball in for the tying touchdown. We all held our breath when Yabo, Ventab Yablonski, lined up to kick the extra point. It went straight for the goal posts. No one exhaled before it split them. We were up by a point. And we lost our voices screaming, not knowing we had just seen football history.

The cadets did not look so arrogant when we all boarded the downtown IRT express). It was payback time. We took out our own white handkerchiefs and waved them in their gloomy faces.

And to a man (Columbia College was all male in '47), singing at the top of our broken voices, we spontaneously broke into a lusty chorus of "Who Owns New York."

What a day: October 25, 1947!