As another football season winds down, we can take this opportunity to look at another game that has become part of United States sports lore. That confrontation was the Rose Bowl game played on Jan. 1, 1934.

The competing squads that day in Pasadena, California, were the Stanford Indians and the Columbia Lions.

Both Stanford and Columbia are among the most prestigious academic institutions in the United States. One recent ranking of the nation’s best colleges had them tied for fifth place (behind Princeton, Harvard, Chicago and Yale).

Moreover, Stanford plays big-time college football today but Columbia does not. Columbia is a member of the Ivy League, which used to play football at a higher level than it does now.

That does not mean that Ivy League sports programs are not competitive and excellent, but the league does not play in bowl games any more. Stanford, a member of the Pacific-12 Conference, regularly plays in such contests.

Columbia, in fact, has been known in the fairly recent past for being exceptionally unexceptional when competing on the football field. Between 1983 and 1988, for example, Columbia lost 44 straight games!

Then from 2012 to 2015 the Lions lost another 24 straight games. The team’s loyal fans refer to these extended periods of ineptitude as “The Streak” and “The Streak II.”

But Ivy League football was among the best in college sports in the 1930s. In fact, the 1936 and 1937 Heisman Trophy winners (awarded to the best college player) were from the Ivy League’s Yale team.

Anyway, Columbia won the Ivy League title in 1933 with a 7-1 record. This got them into the 1934 Rose Bowl which, as it turned out, is the only bowl game in which Columbia has ever competed.

The Lions’ opponent, Stanford, had one of the best college football programs in the country. They entered the 1934 game with an 8-1-1 record. Incredibly, they had surrendered only four touchdowns all season!

Next week we will see what happened when the teams took the field.