Coach Phil Estes gets a hug in the Brown University locker room after Brown won its second Ivy League football title in four years.

The Providence Journal / John Freidah

PROVIDENCE — Maybe to truly appreciate what Brown did yesterday, you have to know the history.

Maybe you had to have grown up in a time when Brown was one of the perennial doormats of Ivy League football, one of the bottom fish who never seemed to count.

Maybe you have to remember all those years in the 1960s and early ’70s when Brown forever seemed to be running uphill in the Ivy League, perhaps best exemplified by the time a national magazine, picking the Bears to finish last in a preseason article, said only, “and Brown is in Providence.”

Maybe to truly appreciate what Brown did yesterday, you have to know the history.

Because yesterday, Brown made some history.

“That’s the second time we’ve won in four years, and that’s history,” said coach Phil Estes.

Yes, it is.

For Brown has been playing football on the East Side since 1878, and that’s a lot of years and a lot of games. They have been playing football through two World Wars and the Vietnam War and now the Iraq war. They have been playing through a drum roll of presidents. They have been playing through more than a century of this country’s history, from horses and buggies to iPods, from dizzying change that would have been unimaginable even 50 years ago, never mind way back there in the late 19th century.

Tradition?

You want to talk about tradition?

Brown football might have invented tradition.

At least around here.

And through all the years of Ivy League football, a league that officially began in 1956, Brown had won just three Ivy championships.

Until yesterday.

Until they walloped Columbia in the cold of Brown Stadium, going ahead, 24-10, in the first half, then scoring 10 quick points at the start of the third quarter to take away any suspense. Until they beat Columbia for their second title in four years, one they shared this year with Harvard, whom they had beaten in September.

Until Estes proved beyond any reasonable debate that he is the most successful coach in Brown football history, this man who now has won three of the school’s Ivy titles.

It is a wonderful accomplishment, especially when you realize that when it comes to the high-profile sports, Brown is always swimming against the tide. Inadequate facilities. Lack of a successful tradition. The feeling that the Bears are forever battling Harvard, Yale and Princeton and coming up short. All of the things that should never be taken for granted.

“When I came in here with Mark Whipple in 1994, we were going to change everything,” Estes said. “The pictures on the walls. Everything. We never listened to anything about the past. We were going to change the culture.”

They did.

Then, four years later, Whipple went off to UMass and Estes became the coach. And what he has done has been nothing short of remarkable. His three Ivy titles are testimony to that. Much of Estes’ philosophy is based on the same formula that Whipple had — get a good quarterback, spread the field and score a lot of points. The quarterback for the last two years has been Michael Dougherty, and he’s been excellent, finishing his career yesterday with another great performance, going out in style.

In many ways, of course, Brown football is no longer what it once was around here, back when Ivy League football dominated the Sunday sports pages, back when Brown and Columbia seemed to play every year to decide who was going to be the league’s doormat.

You could see that yesterday, too.

Yes, it was cold, but the crowd was sparse, especially considering that Brown was going for the Ivy title.

“I think people missed a great game today,” Estes said.

There are reasons, of course. The decision to make the Ivy League Division I-AA instead of I-A, a symbolic move that made it seem less significant. The proliferation of college games on television, so why go to an actual game if you can sit home and watch Notre Dame on television? The overpowering allure of the NFL, to the point that students, many of whom probably don’t even know where Brown Stadium is, never actually go to a game.

All have combined over the last couple of decades to diminish local college football.

That’s unfortunate.

It’s also not without a certain irony. For here is Brown in its best football era in a half-century, and it comes at a time when local college football seems all but slipping away. Here is Estes, arguably the most successful Brown football coach ever, and it comes at a time when too few people seem to appreciate it.

Which is why yesterday seemed so special, even in the cold, even in a game that was essentially over at halftime, even in a game that in a better sports world would have been great to watch.

For at the end, there were the Brown players celebrating on the field, having just made history, having just won their second Ivy title in four years, something that once upon a time would have been unheard of.

The kind of history that maybe you have to have grown up with here to truly appreciate.

breynold@projo.com