Yale is a shadow of its former self. The Yale Daily News only publishes print on Fridays. Clementines were removed from Commons. And, for the past 43 years, students have been deprived of a quintessential Yale tradition: bladderball.

Once a year, at precisely 11 a.m. on the day of the Yale-Dartmouth football game, a giant inflatable exercise ball — the bladderball — would roll out of Phelps Gate and onto the streets of New Haven. The winning team was the first to free the ball from the ensuing mob and rush it to the president’s mansion on Hillhouse Avenue.

In 1982, after a string of hospitalizations, Yale’s administration officially put an end to the time-honored tradition. In some ways, the decline of bladderball is symptomatic of a larger trend of risk aversion among today’s college students. If we are to truly extract value from our time at Yale, we must learn the hard way to weigh risk against reward. The University, for its part, must support us in doing so. In other words: bring back bladderball.

The origins of Yale’s homespun sport are as ludicrous as the sport itself. Yale Banner staffer Philip Zeidman ’55 — who would go on to serve as a speechwriter for Vice President Hubert Humphrey — owned a large, six-foot-diameter exercise ball as part of his basic training for the Korean War. After the war ended, Zeidman decided in 1954 to put the ball to good use to settle a rivalry between several campus media outlets: the now-defunct Banner, the News, the Yale Record and the Yale Broadcasting Company. Bladderball was born.

Bladderball’s rules were largely unclear, as was the process for deciding its winners. Teams often blended into one another in the intoxicated mass of students. And the News, for its part, had an annual tradition of declaring itself victorious, boasting in 1969 that it had “dominated the annals of bladderball lore” by “rolling up a total of 189 wins to no losses.”

Yet perhaps the point of the spectacle wasn’t to win.

Bladderball was intentionally and self-assuredly absurd. In 1976, a team representing Pierson College chartered a helicopter to circle over Old Campus. Aboard the aircraft was Pierson’s then-head of college, Gaddis Smith ’54, who dropped fliers urging other teams to surrender. The same year, several members of the Saybrook team were suspended after breaking into the Branford dining hall and pouring garbage laced with butyric acid from its rafters. The dining hall was closed for a week.

Antics like these were the tipping point for the University. In 1982, following one too many broken bones and a trampled Volkswagen, Yale’s administration finally intervened. “I don’t think it’s an event whose historical roots justify the risk of life and limb,” then-President A. Bartlett Giamatti ’60 GRD ’64 said at the time. Giamatti’s announcement made the front page of the News.

Subsequent attempts to revive bladderball as an annual tradition have failed — with a one-off game in 2009 eliciting a strongly-worded letter from the Council of Masters.

Yet our acquiescence to the ban hints at something much larger about today’s college students: that we are more than happy for an excuse to avoid taking risks. Many of us don’t drink. We don’t do drugs. And we rarely flirt with members of the opposite sex. What might happen, we often ask, when something inevitably goes wrong?

To be sure, this sort of risk aversion isn’t totally unfounded; I, for one, almost never go out on the weekends. Many of us see a Yale degree as a “golden ticket,” one that would be naïve to throw away in an ill-thought-out moment of over-indulgence. Criminal activity like vandalizing the Branford dining hall has no place in an academic community like Yale.

But perhaps it is because I don’t party on High Street that I have the self-awareness to recognize that I need other outlets to take risks in my life. To be a college student is more than just locking yourself away in the stacks, agonizing over your next paper or problem set. Part of the college experience is to learn to take risks — and to learn to deal with the consequences when things go wrong.

“The view of bladderball as simply a great excuse for getting drunk and relieving tensions does the game a great disservice,” one former student light-heartedly professed in these pages.

In taking actions like banning the spectacle, the University walks a fine line between paternalism and responsibility for its students.

Indeed, so much of the Yale experience today is defined by risks taken by students who came before us. The sauna that once stood in the Hopper basement — while, perhaps, having jeopardized student health — retains its mythical status long after having been removed. Legends tell of students using a pulley to hoist the neon “Bookworld” sign into the eponymous fourth-floor Hopper suite. And it was an incident in 1975 in which the Jonathan Edwards team popped the bladderball with a grappling hook that prompted the original “JE Sux” chant. How will we shape the Yale experience for future generations without similarly putting our personal and academic lives on the line?

What’s needed? A mutual recognition from the University to students that there is room for grace if risk-taking goes wrong and from students to the University that we will be responsible for how they take risks. If Yale professes to be an undergraduate-focused institution, as it so often does, then it must acknowledge a fact about college life that it might prefer to sweep under the rug.

But the stakes of bringing bladderball back are even greater than that.

“Bladderball, we have found, is the solution to the world’s problems. Eisenhower, Khrushchev, MacMillan and DeGaulle should solve all their difficulties by a yearly bladderball game,” one former Yalie proclaimed in a 1960 piece for the News.

Perhaps it is bladderball that will finally unite this campus — if not the entire world.

Correction: A previous version of this article erroneously stated that efforts to revive bladderball have failed. While the 2011 and 2014 attempts were quickly shut down by Yale Police, the 2009 game went along as planned. Thanks to a Yale alumnus (and former bladderball athlete) for catching the error.

MAX GRINSTEIN is a first year in Grace Hopper College. In his biweekly column “From the Archives,” Max scours through 130 years of digitized papers in the Yale Daily News Historical Archive to comment on the campus issues du jour. Max jokingly sees himself as a contrarian centrist in a sea of campus radicals on the left and right. He can be reached at max.grinstein@yale.edu.