They had no idea what was about to fall on their heads. On Oct. 10, my old classmates came back for the 50th reunion of the undefeated 1959 football team from Hofstra University. Homecoming Day, it was called. 'Hofstra's been a second home to me,' Steve Miller, a tackle on that team, said Thursday. 'Now I feel like it's been burned down.' Miller was absorbing a worse shot than anything he ever took on the field. Our alma mater has abolished football, with no warning, in the name of fiscal prudence. I take it personally because they are my friends. As a student aide to the athletic department, I announced home games, called in the results to the papers, and I also took classes with the players. They were student-athletes in the best sense of the word. Now our alma mater has terminated the program that eventually sent John Schmitt and Wayne Chrebet and Marques Colston to the NFL. 'Football is such an important part of college,' said Robert Gutkowski, once the president of Madison Square Garden, now a partner in Innovative Strategies Management. He went to games as a child and recalls watching Fran Lynch, a running back who played nine years for the Denver Broncos. As a student in the late '60s, Gutkowski was one of those rare Hofstronians who actually went to games. 'Such an indictment of the times,' Gutkowski said with a sigh, referring to the harsh economy. Hofstra has guaranteed scholarships to the current players, promised easy passage to other football schools, but has effectively banished what Howdy Myers, the withdrawn coach with the flamboyant offensive soul, helped build. 'I feel like a good friend of mine has passed away,' said Lou DiBlasi, who was tossed out of school, grew up in the Marines, came back to play on that 1959 team, and later coached in high school. Hofstra will not produce any more football players like DiBlasi or Miller or George Dempster, the co-captain, who later became the chairman of the board of trustees and helped save the school when it was going under in the '70s. George's name is now engraved on the communications building: Dempster Hall. 'The best athlete on the team,' recalled Mike Manzer, an end on the defensive platoon in that year of limited substitution. George even moved from guard to quarterback during a plague of injuries in 1958. A few days before the final game in 1959, Dempster had an emergency appendectomy. After his teammates won, the seniors nailed their jocks to a board, in the old tradition of 'hanging 'em up,' and then carried the board into George's hospital room. They tell that story and they talk about departed teammates, including Ted Poliskin, Frank Mauro and Bernie Larkin, all of whom died recently. They remembered how only a few thousand fans would come out on Saturdays. It was a commuter school back then, but the jocks and journalists and drama majors like Francis Coppola and Lainie Kazan all rented rooms around campus -- the inner core, we felt. In that undefeated season, Bob Spiotta was a tackle in the afternoon and Stanley Kowalski in the evening, and later he caught up with Coppola out west and helped found Zoetrope. Hofstra people did all right. (There was also a guy named Madoff in our class but he doesn't show up in the yearbook my wife and I co-edited. Nobody heard of the schnook back then.) The football team is all over our yearbook. Howdy's genius. Linemen like Chet O'Neill and Tim Gannon. Tommy MacDonald, the unsung quarterback. And Doug Lewis, the only black guy on the team, who arrived as a quarterback, but, it being the late '50s, Howdy converted him to a wide receiver, a terrific one. They won all nine games. They made Hofstra proud. Over the decades Hofstra downsized football, then upgraded it, under Dempster and Dr. James M. Shuart, two football linemen who became board chairman and president of the university, respectively. When Stuart Rabinowitz took over in 2000, he did not seem to like football all that much, particularly its deficits. Hofstra made mistakes. With the wonderful Dutch heritage, who told the school to change its nickname from Flying Dutchmen to the Pride? I detect a Babe Ruth hex in there somewhere. It blundered into the Colonial Athletic Association, which mandated expensive trips up and down the East Coast. It built dormitories but could never induce students to attend football games. I'm no apologist for football. The other day I advised Notre Dame to downsize. Hofstra could have done that. Instead, it dumped football, leaving my classmates wondering if they will ever be in touch with the university again. 'I've given them some money in the past,' DiBlasi said. ' Right now, my inclination is, hell, no.' 