Ledyard — A 2,000-meter race is commonplace in collegiate rowing. The Yale and Harvard university teams most recently competed at that distance last weekend for the national championship.

And yet it's this weekend's distance that the oarsmen all think of quite often throughout the season: four miles.

"It can be hard to prepare for both. If anything we prepared for the four-mile distance," said Old Lyme's Liam Corrigan, a Harvard junior. "I think I'd rather win this one over the IRA (national championship regatta). It's what we talk about all season. It's not so much IRA, it's Harvard-Yale.

"If we pulled it off, that'd be as good a season as we could've hoped for."

The 153rd Harvard-Yale Regatta, the latest edition of the nation's oldest intercollegiate athletic event, is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Saturday. The four-mile event will be rowed upstream on the Thames River, from the Gold Star Bridge to Bartlett's Cove. The varsity eights will be preceded by the third varsity boats at 4:45 p.m. and the second varsity boats at 5:30 p.m.

Yale has won the last two national championships and also owns the last two decisions at Harvard-Yale (there was no official result recorded in 2016, after Harvard's boat became swamped.) That cracked a dominant stretch for Harvard, which won 14 of 15 races from 2000-14.

"It's incredibly important," said Yale senior Sholto Carnegie said of the race, for which both crews set up camp in their respective Gales Ferry headquarters in preparation. "The rivalry runs so deep. Whenever you put the 'Y' on your chest, you're going out to fight."

"We would rather get raced into the ground than concede," said Harvard coach Charley Butt, in his fifth season as head coach. "Yale has the national title ... this is a separate race, this is a separate season. It's for bragging rights between the two schools."

Yale's first varsity features three seniors in Carnegie, in the stroke seat, captain Paul Jacquot in the four seat and Cole Tilden in the six seat. They're joined by freshman Jack Lopas in the bow, sophomore Thomas Digby, sophomore Thomas Beck, junior Charlie Elwes in the five seat, sophomore Leonard Jenkins in the seven seat and freshman coxswain Vlad Saigau.

Harvard features senior Sam Hardy in the bow, followed by junior Samuel Meijer, senior Conor Harrity, senior Alexander Richards, junior Lars Lorch, Corrigan, sophomore David Ambler, junior Arthur Doyle and senior coxswain Cole Durbin.

Yale led wire-to-wire to beat Washington for the national championship. It will be up to Harvard to not let the race get away early on, something Corrigan said the Crimson did well a year ago.

"It's just being as aggressive as you can from the get-go. Just being stubborn," said Harrity, Harvard's captain. "There's going to be times where you say, 'Oh, (crap), I don't think I can hold on.' But if they get out to an early lead, they're going to have to pay for it, as well. It'll be huge to stick with them early on and make moves later."

Harrity doesn't mind the role as underdog.

"For us to be underdogs, it's a fun thing for us," he said. "There's a little bit less pressure."

Whichever team wins, it will be the newest chapter in an event which began on Aug. 3, 1852, on Lake Winnipesaukee in Center Harbor, N.H. (Harvard leads 95-56). It was first held in New London in 1878.

Yale coach Steve Gladstone, in his eighth season, has turned the program around, leading the Bulldogs to their only two national championships in program history. He believes it was the people he found — these Yale seniors have never lost to Harvard — who love what they do.

Butt, who has been a part of the Harvard program for 33 seasons, took over as head coach on Aug. 13, 2013, following the death of legendary coach Harry Parker, who coached the Crimson for 51 seasons (Parker was 43-7 in the Harvard-Yale race). Harvard still has a moment of silence for Parker each season upon its arrival at Red Top, its training headquarters in Gales Ferry.

The traditions are rich and vivid.

But ...

"There's still the same animosity," Yale's Jacquot said, laughing. "I think it can be a season's crusher if we don't win this. Yeah, it's a dual race. One of us is going to win, one of us is going to lose. You want to be the breaker, not the broken."

v.fulkerson@theday.com