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Seth and Dr. Sap return for a second season of The Teams, brought to you by…

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Previously: 1901, 1925, 1932, 1947, 1950, 1964, 1976, 1980, 1988, 1999

Special Guest this Week: Craig Ross, who was merely a 2,850-year-old druid when…

1. ORIGINS OF THE GAME

(starts at 0:45)

Composite of the Harvard-McGill game, courtesy of the McCord Museum at McGill

Everything you think you know is wrong. Field and town games were purposely ignored through history, which puts a shroud over our records of these games going on in myriad forms throughout the Middle Ages. The American tradition comes out of England. We track the history of baseball because they're linked and it got there first. "Football" refers to all the soccer- and rugby-like games played with a large ball as opposed to "Handball" which used a smaller ball or "Stickball" from which tradition comes field hockey.

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