“We were told to suck it up and play,” Van Fleet recalled.

It was not necessarily what the Mount Hermon team wanted to hear. Among other things, the air had become very hot; now they were not only slipping, but also sweating. “We were extraordinarily deflated,” said the younger Van Fleet, 67, who today runs a business selling saunas, whirlpools and hot tubs in Maine. “All of a sudden our building is burning down. It was not a good game.”

That the photograph was taken at all was attributable to luck, timing and instinct. Robert Van Fleet was not a photographer but the chief of Ottaway News Service, an agency that fed articles to a chain of newspapers. He attended the game not as a professional newsman, but as Jim’s father, and he happened to have a camera with him.

When he saw the first wisps of smoke, Robert Van Fleet related in a letter after the fire, he was troubled by “an immense feeling of helplessness.” But then his news instincts kicked in, and “the rather perverse possibilities of the scene dawned on me,” he said. He took about 20 pictures, timing them to coincide with the beginning or middle of plays on the field so he could capture more people watching the game than watching the fire.

“I had a once-in-a-lifetime shot,” he wrote. He took the photograph with him back to the offices of the local Ottaway newspaper. It was picked up by both The Associated Press and United Press International, and from there it made its way around the world. (Another notable photograph of the year showed Cassius Clay, as Muhammad Ali was then called, taunting a prone Sonny Liston in their world championship heavyweight fight in Lewiston, Me.)

Robert Van Fleet died in 1997, but the picture continues to turn up. For a while, ESPN featured it on the walls of its franchised sports bars. Occasionally you see it offered for sale online. Sometimes it appears without attribution (or with the wrong attribution), a state of affairs that continually incenses Van Fleet’s widow, Celeste, who has a scrapbook at her home in Middletown, N.Y., devoted to the photograph and the correspondence around it.

The photograph was slightly misleading, in that the science building was in reality a field’s distance away from the spectators’ stands, maybe 80 to 100 yards, rather than right behind it. But still.